Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia

If I had an AI spam filter, that actually worked, in SL, the first thing I would do is train it to filter out everybody who says "hello" in group chats. I swear, people saying hello is probably my biggest use of bandwidth lately.

... and that is where debt comes from. Sacred debt, even. That's a much deeper subject. Your debt to family and society can become a type of original sin, that underpins some major religions. Just one example: To this day, financialized debt is used in India to prop up the caste system, when the poor are made to go into debt in order to get married. Taxes can be justified by the idea of paying this debt to society. Once people have this concept of debt, it's not a big leap to invent currency. If somebody gives you a cow, you can't pay them back with a whole cow. If you could, you wouldn't need the cow in the first place, so they would not have given you the cow in a gift economy, where everybody in town knows each other, and the idea of explicitly repaying a gift is insulting. In a debt economy, though, you must pay them back. Over time. With interest, preferably. Modern humans feel that it is immoral to not pay them back. So how do you pay them back? You can try barter, but it's awkward. You can give them a porterhouse steak every week, until the weight of the steaks adds up to an entire cow? Probably not. You could repay in chickens, maybe. Currency seems to be the easiest way to do it, though. Currency also seems to be the easiest way to quantify income, and levy taxes as a portion of that income. It is an elegant solution, that solves a lot of problems at once. It's been years since I read 'Debt: The First 5000 Years,' so I may have gotten some details wrong, but IIRC, that's Graeber's story of where money comes from. Gifts lead to debt, which leads to currency. Barter is a temporary solution, that only ever seems to happen for short periods, when currency breaks down for some reason (failed state, hyperinflation, etc).

Disagreeable people? Where? Here? No way! I hate disagreeable people! We better get rid of em, quick. You just show me where they are, and I'll take care of em! I'll give em a left, and a right... I'll box their ears, I will!

I made a flickr album of all my avatars. The avatars are naked, so technically NSFW, which is why I'm not embedding any shots here. The shots are about as erotic as an anatomy textbook, though. https://www.flickr.com/photos/27384332@N07/albums/72177720316637269

Good to meet another fan of David Graeber! For those unfamiliar: Graeber was a brilliant anthropologist (well, I think he was brilliant), who wrote about this kind of thing extensively. Basically, he showed that there never was a barter economy. We have all been taught that before money there was barter, but it just isn't true. Before we had money, barter was a rare thing that happened with strangers, and foreigners, and sometimes, like with the aboriginal tribes, it involved elaborate, religious inter-tribal rituals. Ancient, pre-currency economies were based on gifts, which means people would give each other stuff based on their need, and social standing, connections, traditions, and their own need for higher social standing. This didn't just happen with Native Americans. It's a universal thing, that happened across Celts, native Americans, in India, China, etc. It's all very complicated when you start asking why people are doing this, but the evidence is clear that this is what happened. I think the best way to explain this kind of transaction to modern humans is to think about dating and families. When a man's date wants a cocktail, it's common for the man to buy it for her. He doesn't say "I'll trade you a cocktail for a beer," or make out an invoice for her to pay him back, with interest. He just buys her the cocktail. That's the expectation for the default behavior on a date, unless they explicitly negotiated going dutch ahead of time. Also, when a child is hungry, one of the parents feeds them. We don't tally up the amount spent on these things, and demand payment later. Nobody is threatening to evict their deadbeat toddler for not paying for their dinner last week. These things are gifts, and we give them for many reasons, including social standing, social connections, and tradition. Many economists take issue with Graeber's economic arguments, partly because Graeber was very liberal (he's credited with founding Occupy Wall St). I haven't seen a serious academic take issue with his anthropology, though. It seems settled that he is historically correct. I have seen nothing like these ancient gift economies in SL. I think it would be difficult to get enough people who can wrap their heads around the ideas involved enough to pull it off. Also, there's the problem of where stuff comes from now. When everybody purchases everything with lindens, they expect to exchange everything for lindens. Also, lindens are currently the only way for most people in SL to get stuff. Things may have been different years ago, when everybody in SL made things, but nowadays, most people probably can't rez a box prim deliberately. It would probably be easier if we all made stuff and traded it. I think maybe trying this out at Burning Life would be the best way to try it. IRL, they don't use currency at Burning Man, so why do we use lindens at Burning Life? I have never been picked to volunteer at Burning Life, though, so IDK how that festival works.

I just tried watching Dazed & Confused, for the first time since high school. I was in high school when it came out, in 1993, and I remember it being a massive blockbuster back then. Now I'm looking at it going... how? It's kinda cool to see big stars just getting their start in Hollywood, but the movie is just so bad. It's like they took all the worst parts of teen movies from the 70s and 80s and put them all into one horrible, stupid film.

Oh, one more example! The OceanGate Titan submersable, that imploded on a trip to the Titanic last year... OceanGate used SL to train people on how to use the Titan. That would never work on a real life submarine. That submarine clearly escaped from SL, into the real world!

I saw this video of an electro-mechanical, cubical spider lamp, and my first reaction was "I've seen this in SecondLife!" I actually went to the marketplace, to try to find it, but I can't. Maybe somebody else knows what I'm talking about? Or maybe I"m just misremembering it, because a prim-looking cube with glow has some spider legs is just the kind of thing my friends used to make in sandboxes. It's kinda like when chess grandmaster Gary Kasperov was running for president of Russia, against Putin, and during a speech, in RL, some griefer attacked him with a flying *****. The Tesla Cybertruck and the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, are other things that exist in real life, but in my head, they clearly belong in SecondLife. These things are escaping their VR containment, like ghosts in Ghostbusters. Have you ever seen things that make you go, "what is this doing in RL? This belongs in SL."

I disagree. A multicam format could work, but you would have to avoid having the RL person and the SL avatar on screen at the same time, I think. I think it would be cool to show the SL avatar at the beginning, to show that Lab Gab is filmed in front of a live studio audience, in SL, but then cut out to the RL speakers, and stay with them from there on out. The main reason for this is that the avatar looks silly when you put it on the screen next to a human being. For examples of this, I don't think we have to look farther than Mark Zuckerberg, and his uncanny valley feeling interviews about Meta. I mean, sure, the Zuckerberg avatar is ugly in any universe, and Mark is the human incarnation of the uncanny valley, but I think that even if that wasn't true, it would make a problem. I think you could have the best looking avatar, on a screen doing a virtual interview behind the best looking actor or celebrity in the world, and it would still feel weird. Once you adjust to seeing double, where one person has two bodies, that look different, you will notice SL looks more cartoonish when you put a RL person in it, or in front of it. SL looks great! SL isn't the problem. The problem is the juxtaposition with RL. You want to justapose it maybe at the beginning, and then cut into SL again if you are doing Q&A with the audience, to show that the question is coming from an in world person. It needs to be done tastefully, though. I don't see a reason to cut to the avatar being interviewed any more than you have to.

Ever notice how group chat bugs out and stops sending your messages at the worst times? Like, just now, I was saying on one group that it would have been nice if a different group posted a notice about something. Then I checked, and found out they did post a notice. So that means I gave the first group bad information. That won't do at all, so I went back and tried to tell them that. Message got dropped. I resent. Message dropped again. I can message other groups, but the group messaging is just very slow. After about 5 minutes, they finally let me message the first group to correct myself. That never happens when I say something nice, or at the end of a nice conversation. It always happens at just the wrong moment, to make things as awkward as possible. I swear, sometimes I think there's a linden somewhere with a switch that turns my group IMs off and on, and he's laughing at me, LOL.

I've seen two or three image macros in this format this week. Not enough to be viral yet, but Foghorn Leghorn reacts to stuff could be a fun new image macro format.

I used to go to Bella's, too! Unfortunately, it closed. Restaurants seem to open and close all the time, but Bella's was around for over 10 years before it finally went under. My favorite place to roleplay a coffee date now is the little cafe on the lake at Calas Galadhon. For food, I like everything at the What Next shop. Also, the What Next group is like 150L, but it's the best deal in SL groups, because of all the group gifts they have. I join it, and grab everything in the group gifts area, and leave, then to back maybe once a year, and rejoin for a bit to grab the new stuff.

I'm exploring fantasy faire, and some of these shops are so hard to shop in! There are some great shops, but there are also many shops that are not well done. First of all... there are so many shops that don't take the region's lighting situation into account. It's annoying to have to change from shared environment to midday just to see what you're selling. The biggest issue isn't lighting, though. It's layout. Half the time when I walk into a shop, it's a beautiful, scenic nature area. Maybe an underwater area, with mermaids, or maybe a garden, IDK. So I look around, and... where are the things for sale? Takes me a minute to realize that they are selling the things in the nature sim! It's nice to see things together like that, and how they kind of flow together, but it's also hard to really see what I might want, and then if I want it, where's the purchase board. Sometimes what I want is actually three items, or even worse... I just want a fountain, but I have to buy a fountain and a rock and grass and a turtle, because it's all one item. Then, sometimes there are multiple versions, so I have to page through a vendor and carefully select what I want. It's just a mess. I'm not really in the market for nature sim stuff, but if I was, I don't think I could find anything in most of these stores. I have to admit, even for these flaws, these shops are nicer than the endless walls of boards we used to have, in the in world malls. You know what I mean. The walls of boards we had to run through to get anywhere, from a landing point, back in the old days. I just think maybe we went too far in the other direction now, and sacrificed functionality for aesthetics.

Oh yeah, I forgot I also have a fancy audio interface to connect my guitar and midi keyboard, and other special gadgets. Also, an Occulus Quest 2. You make a good point, that more people are probably on mid or low end systems now! You really don't need a high end PC for SL, or even for AAA gaming, any more! I think that idea happened in the late 90s/early 2000s, when people actually did have to upgrade their hardware to play the latest games (can it play crysis? LOL). Things have changed, but our attitudes didn't. Intel, AMD, and nvidia marketing departments aren't really motivated to disabuse us of that misconception. That last game that came out that made me go "I can't play that on my system" was Star Citizen, during it's kickstarter, more than a decade ago. I've built two new computers since the Star Citizen kickstarter, and Star Citizen is still in beta, today. Even on graphics intensive games, with fancy ray tracing that requires gagillions of CUDAs, you just drop the graphics quality a bit and you get 60fps. AAA games still look great, and play great on mid or low end systems. Especially since companies like LL offload so much rendering work to the cloud now, and are also getting better at multi-threading. I think this video explains the situation best. It's 3 years old, but the point is still valid. You don't need a monster work station to play video games.

I built mine in December of 2019, right before hardware prices went thorugh the roof. I spent $700. Since then, I upgraded the video board to a 12Gb 3060, to run Stable Diffusion and experiment with LLAMA and other AI stuff. I also got a gaming monitor with 1ms latency, and 165mhz refresh a little while ago because it was on sale on Amazon for like $75 or something stupid. I think it was for prime day. I don't expect to need to upgrade again for a long time, because it seems like developers are only just now learning to use my hardware's capacity, with multi-threading and CUDAs and all that stuff. Ryzen 7 2700X 32Gb 3000mhz RAM RTX3600 with 12Gb VRAM 1TB, and two 2TB SSDs AX WiFi with good AX router (sent the crappy Verizon router back) @Cinnamon Mistwood is right, though. You don't really need a high end system to game. You certainly don't need a high end system for SL. I think SL users usually do have high end systems, though, because SL users are usually digital creatives. Most of us at least attempt to use Blender at some point. I'm not an expert in anything Adobe, but I am competent with most of the common adobe programs. I tinker with photography, graphics, video editing, music production, and all that fun stuff. Sometimes I'm making stuff for SL, sometimes I'm making it for fun. I do web scripting and some programming for fun, too. I think most SL users are like that. A lot of us aren't, though, and there is nothing wrong with that at all! It's great that SL can run on a potato. Most of us just don't really take advantage of that feature.

It's right here!

I just got a reply from them. They granted me access, and I did a quick test edit on my user page just now to confirm it. It took them less than a day from sending my request to getting access. I emailed at 6PM, they got back to me the next day at 9AM. So they are more responsive than I expected! You might consider emailing them to get access, and documenting your stuff on the wiki yourself, just because more people will find it there than here, and replying to comments here is probably more annoying than a wiki talk page with only a handful of wiki editors. I don't mind updating the lockguard wiki docs for you at all! Just, you know... it will probably take me a week to get up to speed on lockguard scripting, and then I will be checking with you about if I edited the docs correctly, and then edit any mistakes (I'm going to make mistakes)... and telling me what to fix that takes up your time, too. Either way, I really don't mind helping out! I just want you to know about your options. Again, the email address to use to get access is letmein@lindenlab.com

LOL, every time I see this I remember adults telling me "Life isn't a game, young man!" Usually, they said that kind of thing when I was being a moody, teenage jerk. Eventually, I read some Camus, and could fire back with "Life is a game we play without ever knowing the rules." I remember years ago, there was a guy in my area who committed suicide over game addiction. He was so deep in Everquest, he lost everything. Very sad situation, he was in his early 30s, IIRC. You couldn't help but feel for the guy. His mother went all extremist over it, though, and became an anti-game addiction activist. It's sad what happened to her son, but she was a bit of a joke, among the gamers in the area that I knew. She even opened a halfway house for game addiction. She was featured in one of those game addiction documentaries. Last I heard, a couple of people who were about to become homeless for unrelated reasons convinced her they were game addicts, to stay at her halfway house for a bit, but her religious kookery was so extreme they only lasted a few weeks. I haven't heard anything new about her for like 15 years, so I hope she came to peace with what happened to her son, and gave up on her Quixotic crusade against playing games.

I think they do it to get some kind of market research on who is demoing their stuff. Merchants in SL have almost no user data, compared to, say... a merchant on Amazon, or Shopify. I don't blame them for trying to learn something about their customers.

You make it sounds easy, but I'm skeptical. Here's a direct quote from the Editing Guidelines page, under the How Can I Contribute heading: I don't want to build cred with some nerd club. I have enough friends, thank you very much. I just want to write scripts, and make cool stuff, and if I find a place in the documentation that I can help with, I want to be able to help. But maybe this is just another example of a poorly worded section of the wiki that keeps well meaning scripters like me away. Maybe that's something that can be worded better? Even if I get access, I should probably leave the instructions on how to get edit access up to the Lindens to fix. This language just strikes me as careless, and probably outdated. I'll send an email to letmein@lindenlab.com, to request access, like the wiki instructs me to do. It will be interesting to see if I have enough 'cred' or not, LOL. Then, if I get access, I'll try to clear up this lockmeister confusion. It sounds like the documentation needs some attention from a scripter. If I got the 'cred' I'll message @Lillani Lowell for input to the edits I make. If I don't got the cred, then LL will have to find somebody else willing to work for free.

If somebody has to post to a forum that the wiki is outdated, then that wiki is not being administered properly. LL really needs to open the LSL wiki to public editing. Maybe open edits, with human review would be best. It's just too big, and too important a job, for the people who are maintaining it now.

It could also be a key part of a KVP, which could be formatted in any arbitrary way, to point to any arbitrary data. For all we know, that key could point to an 'easter egg' in the sploder to pay everybody on the sim 1000L from the owner or something. Or it could take money from everybody it's authorized to take money from, and send it to the greifer. Or it could orbit everybody and spam peanut butter jelly time particles to crash everybody's viewer... nobody knows. Nobody wants to know, either! Best to just leave those kinds of things alone.

Jesse Welles is one of my new favorite musicians. He does Guthrie style folk. I think this is his first explicitly anti-war song. He usually sings about the economy, cancer, fentanyl... happy stuff like that. I found him on Tik Tok, which will be banned soon, because apparently congress wants us to throw away the bill of rights, because they say this is what Chinese propaganda looks like, LOL I'm really not trying to soap box, but you know... he only has 3 videos on YouTube. He has a lot more on Tik Tok.

Wish granted! You are now in Open Sim. Have fun with the megaregions!