Ishtara Rothschild

NiaSilk Pearl wrote: If its just my avatar in the image I don't need any consent only if other residents are in my snapshot I need to ask for their consent. Plus if residents are in the shot and they cannot be recognised, I again do not need to ask permission. IS THIS CORRECT? Yes, that is correct. From my understanding, you're also allowed to sell a work that features a photo or video of your avatar. Also I have brought my skin but all the clothes I wear in SL are freebies, would I need to ask permission to wear the clothes in my snapshot if I am to sell for profit? Or is it because they were free that fine? What about the scenery in my snapshot do I need permission for that in my snapshots too? This is covered in the ToS. People who create and/or upload content in SL, quote: 7.4 ... also grant Linden Lab and other users of Second Life a license to use in snapshots and machinima your Content that is displayed In-World in publicly accessible areas of the Service. You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display In-World in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant each user of Second Life and Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of our Snapshot and Machinima Policy. The foregoing license is referred to as the "Snapshot and Machinima Content License." In other words, you are allowed to capture images of all content that is displayed inworld and publicly accessible, which of course includes content that you've paid for. You can freely reproduce and distribute your snapshot and derivative works based on this snapshot. I assume that this includes commercial distribution. But to be on the safe side, I would also contact Linden Lab and ask them to confirm this.

Scylla Rhiadra wrote: I don't know . . . and really don't much care . . . what sort of impact the free SexGen beds will have on the sex toy industry in SL. Not much, I'd bet. On the other hand, without Stroker spewing repulsive crap about having sex with his "SL daughters" to documentary filmmakers, perhaps Second Life might be able to recover from its reputation as a haven for repellant porn addicts. Perhaps, just maybe, someone will want to talk instead about the art, the culture, and the creativity that SL features? Nah, you're right. Ain't gonna happen. I think the TV documentaries that featured Stroker and the adult-rated side of SL have lured more people here than art and culture could ever hope to accomplish. Anyway, the "repulsive crap" is only repulsive if you mistakenly assume that his "SL daughters" were, or represented, legal minors . There is nothing legally wrong with incest RP between consenting adults with adult-shaped avatars. I had a friend RP my twin sister for a while, because there is nothing more attractive to me than my own avatar. Incest is a very common erotic fantasy in SL. Besides, even in RL, the social taboo against consensual adult incest no longer makes any rational sense in the age of birth control, especially not if both participants have the same gender. RL anti-incest laws that don't seek to protect minors are just another example of a moralizing government that tries to control what consenting adults get to do in their bedrooms.

Mayalily wrote: The exact quote is "give a man a fish, you've fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you've fed him for a lifetime." I prefer Terry Pratchett's version: "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

No, you should not be feeling proud of who you are. Being born in a certain geographic region, with certain genes, or into a certain social class is not much of an accomplishment. People should only be proud of what they have accomplished themselves. Nationalism and zealous patriotism are bad enough already. They constitute a form of political extremism, create an irrational feeling of superiority, and prevent criticical self-reflection and badly needed political reforms. But "racial" or ethnic pride is even worse. A skin color is nothing to be proud of. (The only exception is the pride of ethnic minorities that is usually a response to and defiance of the racism they're faced with on a daily basis).

Technically (or rather geographically), the correct term for the continent is Eurasia. Europe is merely a rather arbitrarily defined geographic region on this continent, similar to other Eurasian regions such as the Middle East (ETA: which also includes parts of Northern Africa, to complicate matters). Think of Europe as "Western Eurasia" and Asia as "Northeastern Eurasia". ETA: Some people even define Africa and Eurasia as a single supercontinent called Afro-Eurasia or Eurafrasia.

JeanneAnne wrote: What caused the peaceful dissolution of the USSR (it didn't "collapse") was the totalitarianism, which had nothing to do with Marx's principles, that infected the Communist Party's leadership and could arguably be said to have evolved in response to people like Hitler and US cold warriors' relentless warmongering against Marx's principles. I don't know... Lenin already looked quite totalitarian from where I'm sitting He did everything that Stalin did later on, except for executing fellow communists. He executed plenty of other people with a different political opinion though. But all of that is ancient history. Today, Communist China practically owns the US and is rapidly buying up the rest of the world. Marx is having the last laugh! ) That might be true, but I still wouldn't want to live in China and spend my days in a factory assembly line glueing led-painted plastic parts together, knowing that I would end up in some gulag if I ever dared to complain or blog about the unsafe and unhealthy work conditions. Nothing against socialism and a little utopism, but at the outer ends of the political spectrum (both outer ends, that is) only lies tyranny.

Void Singer wrote: because culture is the difference between two populations, given effectively the same biology. and the number one influence of that is environment. to make an analogy into perspective, both graphite and diamonds are made from carbon, but are unique from each other in important ways. their difference is in how the carbon interacts... just like material science is concerned not with the base components, but their interactions, anthropology is concerned not with the biology of the people involved, but how those people interact. But there are no two human populations that have the same biology We definitely are the same species, and the differences between the populations does not warrant the recognition of subspecies (especially and mainly because all populations continue to interbreed), but there unarguably are population-specific genetic differences. Some differences are morphological, and some are -- as politically incorrect as it has become to say this -- of a behavioral nature. Our environment, including our socio-cultural environment, greatly affects population genetics. Since all behavior and preferences have a genetic basis, this change will in turn affect the culture of a population, and every cultural change again leads to a selection of different phenotypes that thrive in this particular culture. This is a neverending feedback loop that is known as gene-culture co-evolution. In the words of anthropologist Peter Frost: "The last 10,000 years have seen more genetic evolution than the previous 100,000 … or even the previous million. But to say so is anathema to those who still believe that the human mind stopped evolving over a million years ago. The fact that humans are capable of advanced culture and other species are not must be genetically based. Humans are cultural not just because of the environment, but rather because humans have acquired a set of genetic changes that other species didn’t have the great fortune to acquire. Cultural evolution definitely has a genetic basis. Nobody would deny that." PS: This is also what distinguishes anthropology from evolutionary psychology, and what brought about the latter branch of science in the first place. E. psychology is basically a more politically correct (and therefore less fact-based) form of anthropology, which presupposes that our evolution came to a full stop at some point before we started to migrate into every corner of the globe (aside from minor changes in skin color and morphology, that is). But it's not that simple. Our genetic evolution is an ongoing process, and it affects not only our anatomy, but also our behavior and our culture.

Anthropologists don't view culture as separate from biology and genetics. Although some specialize in socio-cultural or linguistic anthropology, human evolutionary biology and -psychology is still the main field of anthropological research. Culture and and language is always seen in context with the environment and our genetic adaptation to it, since gene-culture co-evolution renders these aspects inseparable. For that reason, anthropology is probably the most holistic field of the natural and social sciences. It combines evolutionary biology, paleobiology, ethology (or behavioral psychology), evolutionary psychology, genetics, history, sociology, neurology, linguistics, archaeology, and even comparative mythology in one single, anthropocentric science that mostly tries to answer questions about our past, but also makes predictions as to where we're probably headed. It's not true that anthropology is limited to the past and present of humanity. If any science is a good predictor of future socio-biological development, it is anthropology. As for SL, I agree that there is a certain online culture, or rather multiple "gamer cultures" for the lack of a better term. But those are not really complete and functioning human cultures in the true sense of the term. The fact that we added 3D imagery and scripted behavior to what is basically a collection of chatrooms does not mean that we really live here and procreate here. Some role play these activities, but it is only a simulation, just like everything else in SL. We don't have a political system, we don't practice agriculture (the two hallmarks of civilization), and we don't struggle to survive in this environment. A researcher can't even be sure that SL participants truthfully answer his questions. One cannot make any statement about, say, the behavior and motivations of female residents, because a considerable number of them happens to be male. Aside from gender, people also tend to lie about their age, location, occupation, financial situation, average time spent in SL and so on. SL's anonymity makes fact-based socio-cultural research pretty much impossible, not to mention anthro-biological research. It might be interesting to research the inworld activities of SL residents in the light of their RL background. As Dillon pointed out, our online habits can profoundly affect our RL, and vice versa. Meaningful anthropological research would necessarily include the cultural and biological (gender etc.) RL background of SL residents. I mean, we are not even a single species anymore in this world, which makes it impossible to view SL detached from the reality that its inhabitants still live in. The nekos and dragons that we pretend to be here are only of interest to felinologists and cryptozoologists

JeanneAnne wrote: Everything on SL should be free. Everything that's good about SL is already free and everything that's wrong with it is due to it being run by Capitalists who care about nothing but corporate profit. I call upon everyone who Creates to renounce greed and share freely with others, in the spirit of Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and John Lennon. Imagine! Jeanne That's a great ideal, but we would first have to realize this utopia in RL. As it is, most people still need to earn a living in RL, including the employees of the Lab. Without commercial content and services in SL, this platform couldn't possibly exist. Every freebie takes away from the bottom line of content creators who ultimately finance all public places in SL. And the more people join SL without financially contributing to the economy, the higher the tier cost for public sims. When LL opened the floodgates and allowed people to join SL without payment information back in 2006, they greatly underestimated the population explosion and the resulting bandwidth, network infrastructure and data storage costs. As a result, the tier for private sims went up by 50%, and it became nearly impossible to finance a sim without somehow earning the tier back. If we all were to "renounce greed", there would be no public hangouts save for welcome areas and infohubs.

Bandito Razor wrote: This, the "lack of risk", is the very reason I don't understand why someone would want to keep all their SL relationships as just SL. Life is ABOUT risk, over coming the fear that says "but they won't like me" or "something could go wrong". Everything is a chance, so I figure why not meet it head on? Because there are more emotionally baggaged, neurotic, or outright crazy individuals in places like SL than in any RL environment save for a psychiatry ward (I'm one of those crazies myself, so I'm allowed to say that ). And one can't really gauge people and their behavioral oddities unless one meets them eye to eye, supposing that they're capable of looking you in the eye and don't just stare at their shoes or at the wall behind you while they feverishly scratch their arms to get rid of all those imaginary spiders. The guy who mutters to himself in the streets, wears a bobble hat lined with aluminum foil and collects dead pigeons in his freezer can appear completely normal in a text-based environment. That makes meeting an SL acquaintance a much higher risk than going on a date with someone who you've already met in person, lives in the same town or is acquainted with one of your friends, and has a known history of taking regular showers and not trying to strangle people with a toaster extension cord.

Taylor Roff wrote: I see people come to SL for many reasons. They also stay or leave for many reason. AND, while motivations may change, we all get something different from the interaction. Ishtara, I agree with you totaly, in theory. If this is how you "role play" SL, I hope your friends play the same way. But for many of us, it is different. I don't really role play every aspect of SL. I only RP actions, not emotions. If I hang out with somebody, I'm entirely myself and really enjoy and value their company. And if long-time acquaintances suddenly don't log in anymore, I'm genuinely concerned. However, at that point I realize that my friendship with them was just make-belief, because I have no way of contacting them and no idea what might be going on in their RL. An RL that I don't know anything about. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Many people (including myself) play SL, or outright live in SL, because it allows us to keep a certain physical and emotional distance to the people we interact with. We constantly advise one another that it's unwise to give out personal information or arrange RL meetups. After all, one never knows if one's best friend or SL spouse is a deranged stalker or an axe murderer. We only like and love as long as they don't get too close and can easily be switched off. It is this distance and anonymity that reduces SL friendships to mere RP, no matter how real they might feel while they last (which is a rather short time in my experience). The best friend that I've had in SL went off to play Vanguard. She invited me to join her there, but I didn't level up fast enough to keep up with her. She made new friends among the more serious gamers, found a guild, and never returned to SL or bothered to contact me again. The SL stage of her online life was over, and I was nothing but a protagonist in her SL gaming experience. Both MMOs and the people that we meet there are exchangeable, and as we lose interest in the games, we also drift apart from the players. I've also made many friends in SWG and Sociolotron, but with one exception I've lost contact with all of them when those online communities broke apart. The one person from those days that I still occasionally chat with shows up on yahoo once or twice a month. If I happen to be in a bad mood or depressed, he usually logs out again pretty fast. It's so easy to manage our social experience in online environments and click that little X in the upper right corner in case things start to get boring, or too dramatic and real. How often have you heard SL residents say that they avoid drama like the pest? People use MMOs and other social online platforms to unwind and have a good time. If they don't find your company rewarding, they might as well excuse themselves and see what's on TV. Complain about being switched off like a kitchen appliance, and you're a drama queen in their eyes. Try to contact someone who only wants to switch you on when it is convenient for them, and you're also labeled a stalker. That's why none of this is real, no matter how real the person at the keyboard is that you'll usually never get to know. In RL, people depend on one another, but online relationships are ultimately superficial and inconsequential. I've learned to accept that, because I, too, reserve the right to manage my online experience and switch people off if they bother me.

UncommonTruth wrote: Are the people playing SL not flesh and blood? It broke my heart when people I had come to think of as friends would leave never to be heard from again. In a place like this, where all you know is what happens when they're logged in, never seeing them again is tantamount to death. After awhile, I got sick of mourning lost friends, so I crossed over. Now my friends are offered my email at the very least. There certainly are real flesh and blood people behind the avatars, but one usually never gets to know them. And as you said yourself, one day they up and leave and you never hear from them again. At that point, you find yourself without any contact information, and the person might as well have been an NPC in a MMORPG. Even if you exchange email addresses, you still don't have any idea who the other person really is.

Oh, I'm sure that the text is sufficiently academic, but I'm not so sure that SL warrants this kind of academic attention and in-depth analysis. MMOs, virtual worlds and other internet phenomena are rapidly changing and overall pretty shortlived, much unlike the biological and cultural aspects of human nature that anthropologists usually concern themselves with. I mean, one could write entire books about the IRC culture or the history of Pacman, but a side note would suffice imho. ETA: Besides, I agree with Randall (for once) that SL is best experienced firsthand and not just read about

I'm a huge anthropology geek, but I wouldn't want to read this book. I really don't see what an anthropologist would want to study in SL (unlike, say, a psychologist). At this point, there is nothing that deserves the label "culture" in so-called virtual worlds. SL is but a pastime for people from all over the globe, without homogenous cultural or linguistic roots, and without any aspect of human biology. Mr. Boellstorf might as well live among and research the "natives" in World of Warcraft, and attempt to study the culture of orcs and night elves In my opinion, this is nothing but an attempt to cash in on an MMO phenomenon that has a certain freakish curiosity value because the publishers labeled it a virtual world and deny that it's just a game.

Friends are people who are there for you when you need them, people whose address and phone number is known to you. Friends stick with you through everything and take an interest in every part of your real life. They offer you a real, physical shoulder to cry on and give you a real, physical hug when you badly need one. Friends occasionally drop by for a visit and chat with you you face to face. They help carry the furniture when you move to a new place. They even lend you some money if you find yourself in a tight spot. Friends are the people who are willing to visit your wedding and attend your funeral. None of this applies to the anonymous people that we meet in SL. Usually, we don't even know their RL name and have no way of contacting them outside of SL. And I know from past experience in other MMOs that when SL is about to float belly up, all supposed friends will go their separate ways and probably never see each other again. So unless I had a close relationship with somebody in both worlds, I would not consider them a real friend. What happens in SL is friendship RP, just like romantic relationships and SL marriages are just RP. Real friendships involve real flesh and blood people.

The way I see it, we merchants use a business platform / software solution that is widely known to be quite unreliable and bug-ridden. If we still do business in SL despite its many flaws, we have to accommodate our customers when they experience problems and err in their favor. After all, they can't prove to us that they didn't receive an item. All they can prove is that they paid us money. It's annoying enough to have to wait several hours, or sometimes days, until a merchant is inworld and able to deliver an item manually. Questioning the customer's honesty only adds insult to injury. It's up to us merchants to keep doing what the rabid fanboys call whining and negativity until LL eventually fix all transaction and delivery related bugs (one can dream).

Have you tried wearing different pants? That should remove whatever you're currently wearing on the pants layer. Or make a folder that contains nothing but your shape, skin, eyes, and hair base, then right-click the folder and select "replace current outfit".

Inworld transactions have also been known to fail occasionally, especially if it's a scripted vendor solution. Good merchants will err in favor of the customer and redeliver an item. And if the item is copyable, there is no reason not to send the customer a dozen copies if he asks for them.

That happens occasionally. The forum software starts to choke, coughs up some weird html, and recovers again within a few minutes.

I think this is probably less a concern about being stalked than a rejection of all these facebook-like features and the strange lingo of social networking exhibitionists that has recently crept into SL. We don't want people to "follow" our "feeds" or to "retweet" our "tweets". This is Second Life, where nonsense like this can only serve to distract people from their immersive 3D inworld experience. We don't need other people's gossip in our profiles, or voyeurs who spy on it.

Soon everyone will wear glasses with heads-up displays that show all our personal information floating above our heads. Name, relationship status, occupation, interests, biological / birth gender, criminal record etc. But when it comes to this kind of technology, Google is a much bigger privacy threat than Facebook imho. At least Zuckerberg and his henchmen rely on people to voluntarily provide their photos and personal information, whereas Google just takes whatever it wants.

KellyFitz10 wrote: If yes, can you tell me what you did to stop the problem? I'm afraid one can't do anything about that. Just live a happy second life. Or settle for less in RL. Many lonely and desperate people out there. ETA: What can really build self-esteem is to publish an X-rated video on a site like XTube and watch the comments rolling in. You'll be amazed how many compliments you get.

Deltango Vale wrote: "I smoked 40 cigarettes a day back then. Since I gave up smoking, my learning capacity and ability to focus appear to have greatly diminished." -------------------------------------- Ha, so true. It's one of the reasons I love smoking. It gives me a 20-point IQ advantage over my non-smoking doppelganger. There's no way I'm giving up those 20 points. I think you are on to something there. For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind has experienced a very slow technological and cultural progress. About 10-12k years ago, the high-starch diet that came with sedentary farming spurred progress in many areas, but it wasn't until tobacco and coffee became increasingly popular in Western Europe that things really took off. 17th century: European populations start to drug up on caffeine and nicotine. 18th century: Bam! Age of enlightenment and industrial revolution. Coincidence? I think not. In the second half of the 19th century, mass manufacturing processes for cigarettes and matches made the use of tobacco cheap and convenient. More and more people started to smoke. As a result, the technological revolution finally kicked into full gear. But smoking was a male domain until women started to smoke as well in the early 20th century, which brought about the feminist movement and eventually equal rights. Let's look at some historical figures: Albert Einstein was a smoker, who felt that pipe smoking facilitated his mental clarity when working on a difficult project. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were heavy smokers. Unlike Hitler, who quit smoking in 1924 and became quite cranky (it certainly didn't help matters that he was also a vegetarian). Not only did he wage war for world domination, he also started a number of anti-smoking campaigns and enacted anti-smoking laws. Need I say more? Since smoking is being campaigned against and has been banned in most public places throughout the Western World, things have started to go downhill. The economy is in the toilet, productivity has decreased, the quality of public education is going down, science and progress are being vilified, and creationism is on the rise again. This is probably not a coincidence either, seeing that nicotine has been shown to suppress the symptoms of conditions like schizophrenia (quote from a related study: "Nicotine [...] appears to help normalize some cognitive and sensory deficits"). Instead of condemning cigarettes, we should research and advertise ways to safely administer sufficient amounts of nicotine to keep mankind from falling back into the dark ages.

In SL, being followed usually means being stalked. One of the many things that the people at the Lab don't understand about their platform. We are no facebook exhibitionists, we value our privacy.

A Google search for "second life clothing tutorial" turns up 1,460,000 results. Just saying.