it's really nothing new, the others had it too

First, an update on mesh versus sculpts from Miss Shichiroji. It's not a long article, and it's well written; you should take the few moments to go read it.

I only have one issue, really, and it comes down to graphics, as usual. To be more specific, it's that 70% figure of mesh-adapted viewers. That's a great number if it's accurate, but that also means that 30% of all residents on the grid still can't see mesh. And I think it's also important where that 30% resides. (Granted, these days, I tend not to go anywhere, because I've hit the second bout of "figure your life out, this is ridiculous"...but even so, if I walked around in a full-mesh avatar, who'd see me? If I went to Curious Kitties, would everyone see me? If I went to Caledon, would everyone see me? How different are the adoption rates between the Curious Kitties sim, and the Caledon sim, for instance?)

That's the big problem, and it's only going to increase with the implementation of visual "muting" mentioned earlier. Because, silly me, I was thinking the visual loss of other avatars meant that they weren't being downloaded into our potential viewing buffer; I forgot that's now how textures and sculpts (and mesh) work in SL. So that's a solution to a problem that actually doesn't touch the problem at all. Not only do we now have to worry about folks that can't see mesh, at all; now we have to worry that if we do adjust our visual settings, that we're still being hit with high-attachment/high-sculpt residents, before the muting can get in.

I don't have her optimism, but I'm glad she does. And to be fair, I've seen some impressive work from the makers who've converted to mesh.

Next, a long (long long, LONG long long) time ago, I was (briefly) part of the SL Bloggers' group. Right before the group folded, so I think I met all of three people in the group before I went on my meandering, unmerry way.

Now, apparently, it's back. Glad to hear that, and really, I think there should be more blogger interaction, it would keep us all better up to date on the happenings. But I'm annoyed enough by the group chats I have now, so I'll have to consider this carefully.

Next up, something I've been meaning to address for a while: io9's latest opinion post on rethinking steampunk. While I understand the point they're trying to make, I am a dogmatic thinker. Given time with a concept, and some mental crowbar work, I can ponder issues as a whole, and see the grey between black and white. But my first reaction always tends to be a starkly polar one: good/bad; white/black; yes/no.

Add to that the fact that (while I've spent the last several months waffling on this) I've been doing my best to codify what makes a certain sound steampunk, as opposed to another style of music entirely. While I've pondered many "grey" options, at the end of the day I still want to be able to say yes or no to that question.

Rather than assembling a list of elements which a work must have to qualify as "steampunk," we can say that as long as a work has some of those elements, it is steampunk. This frees us from having to define the list and number the elements, which might include "Victorian setting," "alternate history," "steam-powered technology," and so on. Any combination of those will do to make a work "partially steampunk," and a large number of those elements together will make a story "mostly steampunk."

According to the article, I'm a pretty staunch prescriptivist, and while I see the value in adopting definition states closer to "fuzzy logic" than dogma, it still makes me twitch a bit. And while I can definitely see the benefit of refusing to define something as wholly steampunk, or not, but instead to concentrate our efforts on what that particular work brings to steampunk (sound, culture, literature, film) as a whole...I'm still stuck in the desire to have things A or B.

To me, there's no question: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age is a powerful work, but it's not steampunk. If anything, it's closer to cyberpunk, because of its reliance on transformative technologies (to say nothing of the transhumans within the book). And it has plenty of dystopian touches for the critics who deride any cyberpunk work that's not a grim view of the potential future. There's a lot of grim to embrace in The Diamond Age.

Now, though… Neal Stephenson's science fictional novel The Diamond Age, which is full of nanotech and a radically altered future history, is "steampunk." The fantasy tv series The Last Airbender: Legend of Korra, which has superpowered humans on a different planet, is "steampunk." Martin Scorcese's Hugo (based on a YA novel by Brian Selznick), which is entirely mimetic apart from a marginal unreality involving a writing automaton, is "steampunk."

And to me, it's painfully clear that none of these things fit any traditional criteria to be steampunk, so I'm woefully confused trying to figure out why these three, in particular, are even under discussion as steampunk works.

Maybe I'm too dogmatic to embrace "fuzzy logic" where steampunk is concerned. But if we're going to move from an understanding of what works define this genre to what general tenets of steampunk do these works reflect...well, shouldn't we pick works that have more than modern-day buildings in a magic setting, or perfectly acceptable automatons which were operant in the time period, or a future culture clash so severe that half of the working poor have become a linked hive mind, and half of the ruling class have embraced the stiff gentility of (what they, at least, understand to be) Victorian class restrictions, to recommend them?

Oh, and there's a new Hunger Games trailer out. Do watch.

we could sell it out together, seems tomorrow's overdue

Oh yes. Thank you, yes.

Again with this nonsense. Or, put another way, once more into the breach...

And we start with Yonatan's response to Sai, of which I'm only pulling point five:

5. Name-shaped pseudonyms should Just Work. Pseudonyms which don't look like a name in any culture are going to be the hard case. These do seem to be genuinely rare -- most people who use handles use them in addition to names, and most people who use pseudonyms use ones which look like names. That doesn't mean that they aren't important, just that from a prioritization perspective we wanted to help the most people first. What we need to develop is some way for people to emerge non-name-shaped pseudonyms on the service, but that's a harder problem.

Um. Several problems here.

First, yes, he's right--"name-shaped" pseudonyms should Just Work. Does that mean CaptainSparklez is going to get a pass? Is that sufficiently "name-shaped"? What about Fidel Castro? Or J Pizzle? (Though I suppose the latter qualifies under that "celebrity" ruling...)

Or this:

Meanwhile, what is the official policy on names at Google+? It's surprisingly hard to find. Here's one answer: 'Google Profiles requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life.' This is the 'common names' policy referenced by Bradley Horowitz in his attempt to 'clarify' the policy, which actually didn't clarify much of anything at all. Documentation elsewhere says 'your full name is the only required information that will be displayed on your profile.' Numerous public statements on the policy from Google officials have done absolutely nothing to clear up the confusion.

The above passage comes via the Tiger Beatdown blog, and the full thing is well worth the read.

(Incidentally--there's a bit in there with an embedded Facebook search section, saying if what Google really wants is people to tie their full, legal identities permanently to their internet presence, maybe they should take a look at what people who have full legal names on Facebook are posting:

Google claims that the name policy, whatever it actually is, is about safety. It says that forcing people to use 'real names' (I use quotes here because the site means 'legal names,' not real names; not everyone uses their legal name as their active, daily name) will enhance safety and reduce incidence of abuse. This argument is often brought up in attempts to crush pseudonymity, and it's very, very wrong. People are in fact quite happy to be extremely abusive in public under their legal names, as Openbook demonstrates (type in any slur you feel like and prepare to be appalled).

(I picked a generic random word--top of the brain, sadly--and tried it out. Dear gods, it's not just appalling, it's dangerous--there's at least one lass on there who's now got her cellphone numbers archived for all time.)

Kee back to Yonatan:

If I'm not sure if my account is "name shaped" and thus might require additional verification…how do I request verification prior to investing time and energy in the account?

An absolutely valid query.

Yonatan's response back:

We don't have a way to do that yet, and it bugs me a bit. I mean, there is the fallback that even if you get suspended you can change your name to a different name, and you don't lose any of your data, but that won't solve every single case.

A bit?!? It bugs him a bit?!? He's really starting to irk me beyond all reason.

Kee's response in return:

Then someone should speak to the team that actually handles the suspensions because that problem has existed since the policy took effect.

Pretty much, and that seems to be one of the points that Yonatan--and everyone else at Google--keep perpetually missing.

Sai to Yonatan:

Please give examples of the low end for what is adequately "well known". What kinds of online references count?

Also, please note that while the policy before has claimed that e.g. Facebook, one's own website, etc., were acceptable proofs of identity, in practice, this was a complete lie. Consider e.g. the treatment of Skud (among many others).

Will this de facto rejection be changed? Will it be changed retroactively, to fix the problem for people who've already been suspended?

I'd tend to say no; as much as Yonatan seems to be trying for "reasonable, decent human being" I mistrust him from the start because of how he--and Google as a whole--have completely, cack-handedly brutalized what should have been a simple procedure that would have stolen the thunder from Facebook, and maybe--even if only in the light of outrageous hyperbole--changed the world.

Instead? We're given this flawed muddle of a service which isn't social, isn't friendly, isn't easy, and in which people can be suspended for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reasons. Some of us are treating it like it's radioactive. I don't think that's a wrong behavior right now.

I have friends who use the service. I'm thinking of one in particular who uses his real name on the service, and yet most of his friends do not refer to him by that name, ever--in fact, one of his exes only started to call him by his real name after she broke up with him, because she was still angry. Up until that point? He'd been his online pseudonym, to nearly everyone he knew. I have to seriously break down and concentrate to remember he has a so-called "real name"--his handle is more "real" to me, and to most people he knows.

People at his work call him this name. People online call him this name. People on camp-outs call him this name. His ex-wife calls him this, as well as his daughter. When he introduces himself, he himself doesn't use his real name, he uses his handle.

But he raves about the service. Why? Because he got an internal heads-up and knew at that point to sign up for his "normal", two-name, given name, and not his far more well known, single-name, online handle. He has no privacy issues to speak of; no one's hunting after his head, he's fairly secure in his employment, mostly secure in his relationships, owns his own house--plus, sad to say, he's male, which traditionally is the gender less taxed with issues of online privacy, it must be said.

For some of the rest of us? These aren't options, these are threats.

Yonatan in response:

In fact, +Sai ., I'll just tell you some of our top open issues right now:

* Still no support for titles (Doctor, Reverend, etc) in names. This is really important in some communities. Fix known, we just have to do it.

* Show the nickname in a wider variety of places. The priority of this depends a lot on how people start actually using nicks.

* Mononyms. :) Right now these all trigger the "handle" check, and that isn't going to scale well in, oh, say, Indonesia. Real fix needed.

But before we do any of this, we want to get this launch right, adjust the thresholds and so on so that legitimate users aren't being kicked, and so that the overall PITA factor for those people who are affected by this goes down. Expect some trial and error, and a lot more of me going around and asking people questions in the near future.

Let me see if I properly understand this, based on the previous few posts.

1. Even given titles like Doctor, Professor, or Reverend are not supported; it'll cause the system to kick. So even if you are Professor Ethan Sprout, and you're verified as being Professor Ethan Sprout, the system will kick you.

Bad system.

2. Google is assuming that people are going to want to use the "nickname" option. They're saying they don't know how it will best be employed because they don't know how people are going to choose to use it.

My guess? For the most part, they won't. They'll continue to want the names they want. Again, bad system.

3. Single names, as suspected, are not allowed. And yes, this is very much an international issue. So again, Western privilege is showing--because why would people want single names, everyone has double names, right?

Wrong. Very wrong. Some people have one, some people have two, some people have six. And it's not Google's place to judge which versions of given names are "right". They're not Google's names.

So again? Bad system. And while I'm likely going to continue going through the side commentary, I'm pretty much resolved from here:

• the new policy changed nothing;
• the new provisions do not increase safety and privacy concerns;
• and Google continues to lose major and multiple points across the board in reliability, trust, and security.

Way to go, Yonatan. Are you ever going to get Google+ right?

how many rules breaking how many games?

I have no place in my brain for this, so I'm spreading the suffering. Enjoy your Nicolas-Cage-based brain seizure.

Several scattered things today, because I'm too tired to rant about Google+ right now, as much as I want to continue. So, in no particular order:

An archived post from 2008 on the former Virtually Blind blog showed up on a separate search; what it says about copyright and DMCA violations is, unfortunately, still valid for Second Life several years later.

Over on Kotaku, there's a cosplayer who decided Deus Ex's protagonist, Adam, wasn't sexy enough, so gendershifted him. The pictures may be NSFW; they don't show nipples, but they do show breasts. (You'll see what I mean if you click the link.)

Meanwhile, Lifehacker has an article on simple things we can do if we have jobs where we sit a great deal of the time (*coughs*). None of them are exceptionally hard. Consider this the reminder for all of us to move more when we can, because yeah, sitting all day does take a toll on our physical health.

Steve Napierski came up with a beautifully ironic take on video game branding on Dorkly; Twitter wants to hire more people; and Iza Privezenceva is today's definition of awesome. (Also, she looks like the Grangers have a Russian branch of the family, but that misses the point that she's an astounding speed archer.)

In some positive Google+ news, a friend of mine sent me a link to Snorri Gunnarsson's Icelandic volcano photographs, which are breathtaking. (Though really, that could have been on any other service, including Facebook, and still have been breathtaking.)

Meanwhile, there's a 30/70 split on something (for at least me, opinion-wise) regarding MegaUpload. There's a group of people who have decided to band together to declare suit against the FBI because they lost their personal files and did not have backups for them. (Which, okay, look, I've used big file services too to save items I didn't have disc space for, but you have to back up your work, people. Seriously.)

That's the 30% for me; I think it's a good thing for them to band together and declare class-action suits. It improves their power position, and with enough voices (and enough donations, financially), they might be able to power that to a Supreme Court decision.

The 70%? Well, they're calling these groups Pirate Parties. Are you people insane? So, to establish clearly that they have valid concerns and have lost original work that was in no way violating anyone's held copyrights...they're going to identify with pirates?!?

Obviously, you did not think this through, people. Try again if you want people to take you seriously.

swift and sudden, fall from grace

So we have a single-picture release of Katniss' Fire Dress from the Hunger Games, and...well, I'm hoping I'll be more impressed later. Also, I'm a little gobsmacked by their choice of actor to play Cinna--to be truthful, I was thinking someone closer to Austin Scarlett than Lenny Kravitz.

Originally seen on New World Notes came another mention of the SL vampires phenomenon--but this time, from a slightly different direction. And it's one I agree with, quite honestly.

This is the current best-of attempt to lure in the vampiric masses to SL:

(from the Blogger Pictures album)

So, this vampire. I'd love to know both who took this picture, and who's the model. Because I can tell several things wrong right off the bat:

• Where is she, in Little Silent Hill? This is not a Ridley Scott movie. Clear out the snow effects.
• It would also be nice to have someone with a little knowledge of attachments, and adjusting same, to have worked with this avatar before the shot was taken? Because right now they look like fang-shaped lower-lip piercings, not--you know--fangs.
• It would also be nice if they'd have used a vampiric eye that didn't look jaundiced over supernatural.
• And while we're at it, they couldn't have done a little PhotoShop work, trimmed out that jutting ribcage on her torso? Not exactly aesthetically pleasing.

Then (as they mention in the article) Alicia Cachenaux decided to pull up what she thought was the same outfit (called the Vampire Xyla avatar in the Library, apparently). This was her take, which she says was only lightly PhotoShopped, and took her about twenty minutes all told:

(from the Blogger Pictures album; Some rights reserved, Copyright, Alicia Cachenaux; used without permission but not altered in any way save machine resizing (original as downloaded is the same as seen on her site.)

Now, things I noticed about this one:

• You can emphasize "winter" and "chill" without having floating snow particles. Gosh! Imagination! What an astounding thing!
• Also, she's got to run shadows on her machine. Which I will admit, makes this picture look phenomenal without a lot of editing. (But truthfully, most folks can't run inherent shadowing on their systems.)
• She knows how to adjust prim fangs. You'd think Lindens who worked for the Labs would know that, too.
• It's a lovely pose, it's a lovely background, the extraordinarily jaundiced eyedrops-of-Midori look seems toned down, and even the hair looks good. Amazing.

See what a little effort can do? And I do mean little; that was a twenty-minute shot, start to finish. That's about the time it takes to watch an episode of the Daily Show without commercials, people.

Lindens, you could have put up this picture to advertise for vamps. Why didn't you?

I would like to bring up one more thing from the Iris Ophelia article also linked. It seems staggeringly apparent to me, after six years on the grid, that what the Lindens expect and what they get are two radically different things, but this complaint is more specific than that.

What Linden Lab seems to want is pretty clear: they want people to pay them money. They want people to keep paying them money. They want people to play their games, and keep playing their games, because let's face it, it's not easy to live on the grid and not spend money.

I'm not saying these are bad goals. And more power to them when (though usually if) they happen. But here's where the problem is: the tools they're employing to get these paying customers are woefully inadequate to get those paying customers.

Why? Well, first, they seem to use vintage 2006/2007 avatars for almost all promotional materials, unless they're specifically advertising new products, like the vampire avatar. Why do they do this? Moreover--and this one has baffled me every time I see a Linden--nearly every Linden on the grid is also in a 2006/2007 avatar--if not in a significantly older avatar. I'm sure there's a value to nostalgia, but seriously, when the big redesign for Philip Linden takes him from looking like a Naruto clone in spiky hair and an impossible codpiece to...well, someone who walked out of the Castro district after a particularly vigorous night...I mean, okay, the skin's better (and a custom design); the hair's better (sort of); but the outfit? It's an essentially (and only slightly) better-textured version of his original outfit. Come on, now.

And if that's the thinking of the CEO (at the time), that's the corporate culture. And if the corporate culture is saying things like Never update and don't use an AO and don't use prim hair and stay to system layers...that filters both down to the support staff, and down to the customer base.

Frankly, if you emphasize that money's not needed, you get people for whom money doesn't matter, and from there you get people who don't want to pay to play the game. That's a pretty callous statement, I know, but it's not wrong.

More than that, the tutorial walk-throughs on Orientation Island used to emphasize these things. This is how you walk with an AO; these are clothing layers; these are eyes; this is how to walk, this is how to turn, this is how to interact with an object, this is how to open a box.

Once that was thrown out, the only instruction left is the userbase, and most of them are still telling the random conglomeration of friends and strangers that arrive on the grid several specific, and fairly Linden-unfriendly, things:

• Get an AO. NOW.
• This is prim hair. Never wear system hair again. EVER.
• DO NOT USE SECOND LIFE'S VIEWER. Use Firestorm.
• You don't need to rent land. Just pop a house up at a sandbox. No big deal.
• Wear fur.
• Wear fangs.

Is this really what the Lindens want to pass on to their userbase? Because from here, we have to look at the advertising. What's the advertising for SL telling us?

• If you're not human, you don't count.
• If you're a vampire, you count, but really, we think of you as human.
• Water sims are really, really important for all those fun outdoor activities we know you'll love.
• It's possible to change clothes by activating a swirly particle effect.
• It's possible to hold hands with an avatar anywhere you want.
• It's possible to kiss an avatar anywhere you want.
• Ideally, even more than being human, we at Linden Lab really want you to be white. Even though other skin colors are just fine. But you'll have more fun if you're white.

But break down the bulk of the newcomers to Second Life recently. What are they, in majority groups, identifying as? They're almost always from this list:

• Furs
• Vampires
• Vampire furs
• Nekos
• Victorians

Think I'm kidding? Look at the folks around any welcome center. Or even better, look at who's renting land or even buying whole estates after they join the grid? Who are those people? Chances are, they wear fur, or they wear fangs, or both. (And nine times out of ten, within a week, even the "human" appearing girls will be wearing cat ears, anyway.)

So, if you're taking into account the Lindens' stated goals with their advertising, they aren't really working. Even worse, if you're taking into account the userbase's generic and mobile goals, they aren't really working, because in spite of all instruction there are still people wandering around wearing houses on their right hand and complaining that SL's too hard. (And some of these people are using the official SL viewer--I truly think a time must come when the Lindens sit back and say, okay, some people, they're just dumb, and stop trying to drag every single procedure down to kindergarten-speak.)

Ultimately, it leaves us in a very uncomfortable place. Namely, telling our friends to log into SL and join in the game, while ignoring every single image they see on the SL website. And it leaves the Lindens trying to speak to a userbase that really, truly, for all intents and purposes--doesn't exist.

Who's going to pay the bills at that point? That's the question the Lindens really need to be asking.