M is for Myg

 

Between Hawks and dinee, we done been tagged and bagged. But since Burgess is wrapping up a crazy semester, we decided to  answer as a unit.  Here goes.

1. We rarely discuss our SLives with our friends who aren’t in Second Life. That’s because by and large they Just. Don’t. Get it.  We’ve tried to pass along our enthusiasm, the vast potential of the metaverse, the tales of the great people we’ve met and the fun and creative things we’ve done (Clockwork, DJing, Met a Stranger, blogging, etc.) yet they still look at us with the vague disinterest one might show their tax advisor whenever we bring it up. So fuck’em. Hell, I’ve even tried talking to my teenage clients about it (bonus random fact about Myg - I work with adolescents)  and you’d THINK the young’uns would jump all over it, but truth is most of them don’t have machines that can handle SL well enough. I think the technology jump is still a big barrier for a lot of folks, but then we’ll leave analysis to another post.

2. Our dog Mason sleeps in bed with us every night. He’s an 8 month old black lab (8 months old today - Happy 8 month Birthday you sweetie muppeh puppeh!) Yes, I project tremendous child rearing fantasies onto Mason and I’m fully aware of that, like thinking he will somehow read that last line later tonight when I go home and he’s resting his head in my lap, trying to lick the laptop keyboard to score some burrito crumbs (bonus random Mygfact #2 - I eat in front of the laptop, all the time. I don’t recommend it, nor does Apple.)

3. We need a bigger bed. (Please refer to Stunning Fact #2, above).

4. We were brought together by rock. My then-boyfriend was the singer in Alex’s post-punk noise band and I used to go and hang out during rehearsals, quite jealous I couldn’t be in the band. My then-bf quit the band, and I replaced him as the singer. Alex was the guitarist. Later I learned to play guitar and the two of us went on to be in a total of three different bands together, the last one being by far the best. That band did release some stuff and did some modest regional touring and if we were to let you know the name, you could in fact google it and find out our real identities. We still write, record and release music with that band, albeit very sporadically.

5. In the past we’ve both worked for high-ranking politicians and then left politics, likely forever. Working in politics, for me, was so fucked up that I don’t even want to say more about it right now.

6. We are both in the middle of writing novels. (And for those of you wondering wth happened to Met a Stranger, I’m really really sorry! It had to get pushed aside for my latest endeavor for a little while. I am determined to return to it someday because it was the best thing I ever did with my SL time, but it is amazingly time-intensive, so I need to do it when I can fully commit to it again…)

7. We are both American Sailing Association certified sailors and as such can charter yachts up to 50 feet. Of course, we can’t actually afford to charter any yachts right now, nor anytime in the immediate future. Anybody who wants to pay to charter a  yacht in the Virgin Islands this winter and to fly us there, we’ll be happy to sail it for you.

8. We throw a great New Year’s party nearly every year, complete with dancing, pigs in blankets, disco ball, hats and noisemakers, pj’d sleepovers and waffles in the morning, with monopoly playing extending well into New Year’s Day. We were trying to see if there was a way to stream our party into SL this year, so if anyone has any ideas on that let us know. We can and will, of course, stream the music from the party into Clockwork and all of the Mainline group land. But it’s kinda hard to be entertaining meatpeople and pixelfolk at the same time, unless I dance at Clockwork, then get a wireless headset and walk around my house like a jackass… Hey…that’s not a bad idea, except I don’t think there are wireless headsets yet for voice, are there? Anybody? I need a gadget geek on this one (please refer to dinee, fact #2). Thanks.

So there you have an interesting array of facts about the Myg-Alex complex. Those of you who were wondering, “Is that them?” could certainly surmise, by this compilation of dead giveaways, that it certainly is us, but then, anyone who reads M is for Myg wouldn’t have any idea of who us really is (with the exception of one and only one. Or maybe two. Huh…)

We decided not to tag anybody, because to be honest we’re doing this late enough so nearly anyone inclined to do it already has, and because I break all those chain emails too. It’s just how I am.

So, see you tonight for Hawks’ set at Clockwork, alright? 6-8pm SLT! SLURL 

Just because Argent did it.

BTW, good news on the IBM strike:

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: IBM Italy - some news!
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:21:33 +0200
From: christine.revkin[at]union-network.org
Dear Friends,

Many thanks to all of those who have given us suggestions on how to proceed with the IBM Italy workers’ struggle that had remained unsolved after our historical Protest in Second Life on September 27th. By the time we went through all of the excellent and original ideas you gave us, some developments had taken place….indeed there are some very positive news we had to share with you:

1. Mr Andrea Pontremoli, IBM Italy’s CEO (who personally received all of your petitions by email) has resigned. It seems our Virtual action had an impact on his role at IBM. IBM Corporation made a complaint to IBM Italy for the way they’ve managed the negotiations with the thousands of employees and how they’ve let it lead to such a harmful image for the company.

2. IBM Italy management have accepted to return to the negotiations’ table and has already met with the Works Council. We expect an agreement will -finally- be signed in the next week or two. IBM workers have now been waiting an entire year for the situation to unblock, so this is really fantastic news.

We would like to think that all of this has a lot to do with the incredible support all of you have given them over the last 6 weeks. Your involvement with the protest in Second Life, your news coverage of the events and your ideas to pursue fighting in “first” and “second life” have really helped tremendously. You will never be thanked enough.

Again, we’ll keep you informed of the signing of the new agreement for IBM Italy workers!

IBM Protest organisers

FORZA!

UPDATE 6 NOV: Contract Signed! Read about it here.

It’s blog action day and we here at M is for Myg want to remind you that we’re all on a fast train to a special hell called “Global Warming.” Okay, fine then. “Global Climate Change.” But the change isn’t in any way good from what I can tell.

And as much as I love technology and computers and all things electronic (including an obscene amount of loud electric guitar gear), I can’t help but feel toadish at the thought of all the energy I’ve consumed with my life of energy abundance.

There are some groups in Second Life who’ve tried to raise awareness of how our digital selves contribute to the problem. National Geographic online posted an article last April about the staging of a flood related to Global Warming by the group Adventure Ecology. The article casually throws out that a Second Life avatar uses as much energy as the average Brazilian. Holy shit - can that really be true? I tried to find some others in Second Life - please comment here if you know of anyone doing good work in-world on environmental causes.

Here, look at a picture of Burgess riding Orca while pondering the fact that in this picture, he’s using as much energy as the average Brazilian! And that’s without the great food and party atmosphere!

Greenpeace offers a Guide to Greener Electronics, calling out the makers of my beloved Macbook Pro - Apple - for dropping behind the competition in efforts to go green with production. As someone who’s spent far too much money on Apple products this year, that really pisses me off. Here’s what they say about their impact.

But none of us can wait for companies or politicians to actually get this problem under control. We need to so something more drastic to slow the train down, as while the idea of hell might be kind of cool, the reality of global climate change is nothing of the sort. As individuals we can take more impressive steps to hit the brakes.

Today I’m making the commitment to head over to NativeEnergy - a portal to offsetting your impact as an individual, business, or organization. There you can calculate your impact on the environment and give money to support renewable energy projects that will reduce the amount of energy produced by fossil fuels. That means cleaner energy - and less CO2 pollution to contribute to the problem.

So I hope you’ll head on over there and learn about Global Climate Change. I’m going to be pledging some hard earned dough, because while I can turn off lights and drive less, I really don’t want to give up my laptop or my Jazzmaster any time soon, and not if there are ways to help push the clean energy agenda forward.

Yep, that’s what I’m doing today. Hope you will too.

Ed. update: Dosh Dosh has a great list of environmental blogs, for those who want to study it on up.

Carnage greeted me. Bodies littered the asphalt, one slumped, limbs akimbo, on my stoop. I stepped gingerly; get blood on a silk suit you might as well kiss it goodbye. Would it even be the same suit? Is a thing ever the same thing from one moment to the next?

Who was shooting up my neighborhood? Where is the child I once was?

In my line of work, death’s no stranger, yet we avatars do not know it outside our little games. No sitting at bedsides, no phone calls in the depth of the night, no grief or sorrow. Those bodies on my stoop were not sons or fathers.

Serendipitously, I got an IM from Race over in Chicago. Come on over, I said, I got some death to deal with.

The bodies were dressed identically — some kind of army? members of a secret sect? cloning experiment gone awry? — and carried no identification. Their sameness unnerved me — as if someone were desperately trying to create a whole self by creating a thousand empty ones. Why pile such sandbags against impermanence when impermanence is all everything comes down to?

Was this Leviathan’s work? Having them move in next door was like having death as a neighbor. How could I exist so close to that passing stillness where once life walked? Light! More light! Take into the air my quiet breath!

My suit will be a different suit tomorrow. Of course I too will be gone, not yet in the ground indeed, but another come to walk in my place.

The corpses were no match for Race’s shotgun, and before long the square was clean again. As ever, in a world where pyramids vanish quietly in the morning fog, life as we imagined it never was. Can you see that death thus was everywhere (for what else is the absence of life?) and nowhere (how can death be where no life lived?)? I stood, peacefully, as the evening sun faded, watching the shadows of Topgol’s mercurial horizon lengthen into the dark night.

Do people who make clothes, skin, animations, poses and shapes and other gadgets actually make real money doing these things?

I get, and believe, that for huge corporations, there are questions about how much money there is to be made or what the payoff is for investing thousands of dollars into Second Life. But fuck those people for now.

What about the rest of us?

Can we supplement our incomes by making stuff in Second Life? I was trying to look all over the web for anecdotes on this in an attempt to pique the curiosity of a close RL designer friend of mine. And I know it’s true for some big designers, but *how* true is it? How much do these people make? What are the pros and cons of doing it?

If you know where I can dig up answers, please leave a comment!

gratis,

Myg

Anonymous behind my shades, I surveyed the scene: bodies again, bodies in motion.

Funk is the music of determination. What else is there? The mechanistic drill of techno, the chilled beats of trip-hop? Funk is hard work and sweat. The body has to move, full of life, imposing its will upon the world. That’s all there is: what it is is what it is; it’s the beat; it’s being in time because time has come today, my friend. Are you with me?

Clockwork was hopping on Monday night. I’d tell you who was there, but who wasn’t there? — you know what I mean? But we’re there to bust a move, not make the scene, ya dig? Our minds tell us it’s Monday, that our meatpersons are back at work, but truth lies in solidarity: we don’t believe in the meatworld. We believe in life.

Can you feel it?
‘Cause I can feel it.
Can you hear it?
‘Cause I can hear it too.
Can you touch it?
‘Cause I can touch it.

Did you miss it? Do you want it again?

funk for the masses | 30 July 2007: download the podcast [set list after the break]

Yet, even as my head nodded to the funky beat of the Dynamites, I knew something was wrong… Read more

Thank god the women are listening.

Blogher is having it’s big ass convention in Chicago next weekend. Well, I can’t be in Chicago, but thanks to the forward thinking women putting this together I can still go to the conference. See, these smarties are hosting a complimentary event in Second Life at the same time. Wow, what a great idea!

So refreshing, too, to see a big organization actually figure out what Second Life *is* good for. Like bringing people with common interests together across continents. See corporate America, was that so hard?

Somehow, I was asked to do the “meet your fellow blogger” activity in Second Life. I’m honored, to say the least. So, say you’ll be there. Promise? Okay good.

I’m on at 8am SL Time, Friday 7/27/07. And with that kind of spotlight I’ll be doing something goofy, you can bet on it. Then right afterwards you can see the mighty Vint Falken. on a panel with theDivaRockin of podcasting and dj’ing glory, and Koz Farina, creator of the second life blogHUD.

But if you want to go, you need to register. Then you’ll get the info about where, etc.

Check out the schedule here. And register here. (Don’t be fooled by the registration form! It’s painless and free to register. You too, men!)

Until then!

I have not been clear. In earlier posts, I have struggled to make sense of certain suspicions, certain contradictions about our lives as avatars, yet even as some things seemed to become clear, others faded in my perception, as if I were making my way in a fog. I was sure only of one thing: things were not as they seemed.

I am now convinced I have made errors. No matter; all truth is built upon ruins. I no longer believe, for example, in the parallel world of flesh-humans. Or, rather, I believe that the world of flesh, once ours, has been taken from us.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

In an effort to make headway, I have decided to proceed scientifically, with a hypothesis to be tested through a series of experiments. In this way, light may shine where once was dark.

My hypothesis may be summarized thus: we avatars do in fact exist as material, fleshly human beings, and we do in fact inhabit a material world much like the one we know now as “Second Life.” In some way, however, that reality has been erased from our perception. Somehow, we have come to believe (have been made to believe?) in an entire other world in which we exist as different selves: so-called “RL.” We furthermore have come to believe that our avatar-selves are invented fictions of those RL false selves.

A chart will be helpful:

graphic revised 7/22; click for larger version.

Such a phenomenon has several possible etiologies. Perhaps we suffer from a collective insanity; some trauma has forced our psyches into the creation of this false world and our false selves. Some vestige of reality remains as those false selves interact though the delusionary safety of computer screens and keyboards.

But this seems unlikely. The truth is that the invented world of our false selves is much more traumatic and stressful than the wantless life of freedom we have as avatars. It would not make sense to invent such a bleak and violent habitat if the unconscious goal were protection from trauma.

I suspect something more nefarious. I am loathe to articulate what is as yet a nebulous conjecture, so I ask you only to consider the potential control and power made possible if something or someone were able to control our perception of the world and, indeed, of our very selves. Some part of me knows, knows who I am. I am Esteban Moody, and I have lived for centuries. I create matter from the void, and I fly effortlessly upon the air. I am man and woman made whole in one person; I have known the dreams of millions. Yet how perversely I believe I am someone else. Who could this person be? It matters not, from where I stand, some pale man or woman alone at a desk — I perceive this dimly — blinking his or her eyes at some flashing lights.

I suspect that in our true lives as avatars, we have existed for thousands of years. I suspect that some force entered our reality some four years ago and engendered the perception-control transformation outlined above. I suspect that force — an alien consciousness? AI gone berserk? an avatar somehow infused with godlike power? — is, in a word, vampiric. It drains us daily of our life — by what means I cannot fathom, toward what end I dare not guess.