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Sigmund Leominster

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Posts posted by Sigmund Leominster

  1. The demise the Herald is most likely to be fueled in large part by nothing more sinister than real life being more important that a Second one. Folks get busy with jobs to do, families to feed, friends to hang out with, and fun projects that take up time. Ultimately SL is a huge time suck and unless you are incredibly vested in it, your time in-world simply becomes less and less. In the past two years I bet I've stuck my head in-world maybe 10 times in total, simply curious to see who and what is happening. I see most of my friends have gone - or at least hang out in SL as often as I do. Many places have disappeared. It's like visiting a town you once lived in years and years ago and being both interested and disinterested at the same time. That might be better defined as "ambivalent" but whatever it's called, I've no burning desire to go back to spending hours per day focused on the experience. It was fun, it was entertaining, but ultimately little more than a hobby. It's sort of good to see Proky and Jumpy are still around but a little sad that the Herald is moribund, along with other one-time interesting sites.

    Ah well, just wanted to add to a nearly closed thread. And the fact I'm contributing so long after it started is evidence of how little SL plays in my life these days. Stay classy, Second Life!

    Siggy

  2. Although Lexie Linden posted an excellent list of "what it's for" right at the beginning of this thread,  it is, in fact, a textual Rorschach, where people reveal much about themselves simple by NOT adhering to a topic. Change the word "forum" for "Second Life" and you encounter the sane question that most noobs ask almost as soon as they step inside... "but what is it for? What do I do?"

    Those of us who are more interested in the humans behind the avatars than the mechanics of prim building or the physics of the virtual world can get an awful lot of entertainment from simply reading the posts in this forum. Sure you see emotions and agendas peeping through in the other forums, but this "General Discussion" is much more akin to Joseph Breuer's "talking cure" than any other. Rather than have folks lie back on a couch and respond to me saying "Tell me about your mother,' it's easier to say "Hop over to the 'General Discussion Forum' and start chatting."

    "Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore" is a quote worth heeding when you read someone else's post - and when you hit the "Post" button after constructing your OWN comment ;)

  3. Ah, would that we could all take comfort in the belief that we are all above average, and that we are all "special." Sadly, the likelihood is that the average IQ of SL users is 100 and half of us fall below that and half above. There's ample research out there, and has been for many years, that supports the notion that we all believe we are above average intelligence but of course, statistically, that can't be true!

    Quick test: Hands up if you think you are smarter than 2/3rds of the people you meet in SL (or in the forum). Hands down.

    Now, hands up if you think you are dumber than 2/3rds of the people you meet in SL (or in this forum). Anyone holding their hands up? Hmmm.

    We also tend to believe that we are "unique" and "special," along with being "non-conformist," "out-of-the-ordinary," "weird" or "kooky." Again, hands up anyone who thinks they are ordinary, common, uninteresting, and have no real value in life other than living from day to day, "hanging on in quiet desperation," but happy in their dullness.

    Hand down.

    You see, we all want to be different - and to some extent clearly we are - but we also want to be special, and most of us are not. That's OK because there's nothing wrong with mediocrity. It's just hard to accept it. The marvellous thing about SL is we can all become big fish in a small pool, either in-world or by contributing (as we are) to the forums.

    So much as we all want to imagine ourselves as being at that that top shallow end of the human bell curve, the truth is that most of us will be sitting in, and possibly have, a big fat middle.

    Oh, and the first person who joins this thread with the words "well, I'm a member of Mensa, and let me tell you..." should be smacked around the head with a 100x100x100 megaprim and made to eat their own brains (which is, I am told, the definition of "a tenured professor.")

  4. Now steady on there, dear girl! By all means bash away at the royal family, constant rain, warm beer etc., but casting aspersions as to the integrity and deliciousness of Cadbury chocolate is beyond the pale! Cadbury's "Dairy Milk" has been a defining food group for millions and millions of Brits and even though Cadbury PLC is now owned by the Kraft company (they of the "cheese slice"), the chocolate is an intergral part of the national psyche and as British as bacon and eggs, red buses, the Houses of Parliament, whippets, hand-pumped real ale, and the Empire!

    Now, what was the original question..?

  5. Yes, it is bad to have just one outfit. Shame on you :smileywink: You should go out immediately with a good friend and buy at least 20 new outfits in the next week. Then, organize your folders by designer, and remember to leave the LM in the folder so you can go back at regular intervals to check on their latest offerings. Prim ties are good because you can swap 'em about. Oh, and make sure you have at least three shades of shoes. Good news though - no need to hunt for cologne until someone invents the smell-o-messenger system :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

  6. Gosh Dresden, don't let the "fitting in" thing worry you in the slightest! First, there ain't no such thing as "fitting in" when you're talking about a virtual world with virtual avatars. Almost by definition, the endless flexibility of the primmy universe makes it impossible to establish any sense of "normality," ergo everything is pretty much abnormal by default. If that's the case, then there's nothing concrete enough to fit into. We puppeteers who pull the avatarial strings are always reinventing ourselves. Why do you think there are so many threads that talk about deception, uncertainty, and betrayal? Because there is no certainty in SL and that's just the way it is.

    So just be what you want, do what you want, but just remember to be most excellent to each other. Mmh, did I make that one up??

  7. Well whoot my avatar and coddle my eggs! I've been "on the road" in RL for a few weeks and the official "Hippiestock II" invite goes out! Seeing as I missed the first I'm going to do what I can to make this one ;) Thanks for the heads up for "January" because I am already scheduling that far ahead. Still, if I can make it just for an hour... :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

  8. The meaning of a symbol exists not in the symbol itself but in the minds of the individuals who assign a meaning to it. That meaning is also not just a collection of definitions but it also includes an emotional element. When someone is "offended" by a symbol, it is because it elicits an emotional response based on how that person has learned to respond to it. Because people have vastly different life experiences, there is, in truth, no way to control the affective component of a symbol, but what we can usually be sure of is that anything can cause offence if it is encountered experientially in such as way as to cause an emotional component to be attached to its meaning.

    What makes the issue of symbolism so troublesome is that homo sapiens are much more homo symbolicus than we care to admit, and the creation of taboo symbols is a fundamentally primitive human characteristic that no amount of "civilization" can cure. All cultures like to think of themselves as being rational, honest, and just, but scratch the surface of the civilizing veneer and we're still ready to swing clubs at each other. Ask any American if burning a US flag should be a criminal offense and you'd be surprised (or not) how many think it should be. Setting fire to a piece of colored cloth doesn't seem to be grounds for locking someone up, but if the cloth happens to have certain colors arranged in a certain pattern, things change: the primitive instinct gnaws through and we have the ultimate irony of people who believe in a symbol that stands for freedom of expression should not be used by people to express themselves freely!

    The only way to defuse a potent symbol is to challenge it, not ban it. The specific example of the swastika, which as most people are aware only became stigmatized after the Second World War, demonstrated how much we are in thrall to our emotions. If you create an environment to simulate 1940's Germany and avoid including a swastika, you are then committing the grievous sin of historical revisionism - changing the past to avoid any discomfort in the present. If people are offended by the appearance of a swastika in a simulation, that's understandable; but we should not be censoring that contextual reality because it causes some irritation. On that basis, we end up slowly banning anything and everything that causes "offence," and people can be very creative in deciding what is offensive! The two phrases to be very wary of are "It's for the good of the children" and "It's for the good of the people," both of which are trotted out regularly by pressure groups and, sadly, elected politicians.

    So go ahead and create a sim of 1940's Germany and out swastikas in it, along with other symbology that appeared at the time. Some people may be offended - and may even turn up to complain and demand the sim be closed down - but ignoring the symbology to avoid offense is, oddly enough, much more dangerous in the long term.

  9. Maybe I am just a little too mellow at the moment but I can't help being struck by the notion that there could be a story here. Imagine someone meeting the avatar of their dreams and writing down the name, only to find they got a letter wrong and them spent their whole Second Life wandering aimlessly from sim to sim - and never finding them!

    As I said, maybe I am too mellow and on the edge of maudling...

  10. I don't prune my list but I'm sure I get pruned! I'm not one for making friends very much,and many are colleagues from the SL Press, so that may not qualify them as "friends" anyway ;)

    I have only TWO friends who are able to see where I am when I am online. This means, of course, that they could TP in on me at any time!! Giving someone that sort of access to oneself is either the mark of trust or the mark of an idiot. I'll let those two determine which they think I am.

    Are there any people you trust enough to let them see where you are all the time?

  11. It is, indeed, the weekend, and having just got back from my local tavern, I'm not really in a fit state to engage in any debate more complex than "Where are all my friends," so this thread is exactly at the level at which I can participate. That's a long sentence for someone who's mildy rat-arsed to write, but it has taken me nearly 10 minutes to keep fixing the mistakes ;)

    So /me hands Hippie an ice-cold Modelo Especiale with an extra juicy slice of the freshest lime squeezed through the neck and raises his own bottle to all the folks contributing to this 86-page thread!

    Cheers!!!

  12. Ooh, that was a most excellent example of the "blind censor" at work! Apparently if we want to talk about Steely Dan, we can refer to Walter Becker but not Donald **bleep**en ;) I guess the censor needs some fining tuning to recognize word boundaries that are marked by the SPACE character.

    Mmmh, so no talk about the Jewish character in Oliver Twist, the UK pop singer who remade "As Time Goes By," or the St. Louis Browns' catcher in the late 1890's.

    Funny, I bet the words "Steely Dan" get through and we all know where THAT came from! And I don't know whether the Doobie Brothers will slip past the PC sentinel ;)

  13. I'd would be surprised if someone told me that they never got weary of SL at some point. We all get weary of things, whether it's SL, summer ales, chicken pot pie, or whittling wood into small avatars of oneself. Unless you are teetering on the brink of addiction, SL is an optional entertainment and, like Donald **bleep**en's "Nightfly" album, you are allowed to ignore it for as long as you like, knowing that when the mood takes you, you can always play it again and enjoy it as if it were new. I can sometimes go weeks without engaging in prolonged SL activity - and that's even more likely now the sun is shining and there are exciting things to do in RL. So take comfort in your weariness and realise that is merely an indication that you are human after all.

  14. Sounds to me that when life gives you censored lemons you hop over to one of the "Shakespearean Insult Generator" sites and come up with streams of invective that are more poetic than profane. Sure, tossing out an f-bomb may seem daring and tough but it's pretty much banal and trite when compared with such classics as ""Kiss my codpiece thou belsubbering fen-sucked dewberry" or even the more audacious "Wipe thy ugly face thou dankish full-gorged flap-dragon."

    Let's see how the filter handles those gems - you unmuzzled pottle-deep skainsmate!!

  15. Hey, we all like to think we have skills and if we can make some money from employing 'em, that's called making a living. If someone can charge money for someone to indulge in a pixilated fap-fest or Skype-enhanced rumpy pumpy, then my only gripe would be that they're probably getting away with it tax free, which irritates the regular tax-paying stiffs.

    A good and dear friend of mine told me she found it actually funny to get paid for "entertaining gentlemen," with one punter spending 5 minuted tying the words "in-out-in-out" over and over, concluding with the immortal "So how was it for you?" I think she deserved every penny of her fees for that!

  16. Well, it's already a sunk cost so whether you keep on using Second Life or go back to reality, the $72 is, sadly, gone. Whether it's "wasted" or not is all relative, but I suppose if you see it as $6 per month and you've only used a month, then you will feel as if you've flushed $66 down the toilet! Worst case - pop back in once a month just to see what's happening ;)

  17. So can we take it that if you're not posting here, you're sitting somewhere with rubber and glass stuffed up your willy? Can I recommend, then, that you keep posting! Unless you enjoy it... :smileyvery-happy:

    And as for the thread about "Off Topic" being long and "off-topic," that's just common or garden irony at work, or even better, Absurdism at its best! The "Off Topic" topic is deliciously paradoxical and deserves a long run in the Grand Guignol that is the SL Forums.

    But in case I'm missing something, I'm off to find myself a hose pipe and a broken bottle...

  18. Actually, that's not a bad comment to make because it IS important for a learner of English to be aware of which variety they want to learn! Although there is a huge amount of commonality in the Englishes of the world, a learner should try to focus on just one of them before getting bogged down by pointless and endless discussion about the merits of "nappies" and "diapers," or whether "amongst" and "whilst" should be "among" and "while."

    Keep an eye open for the 2011 "SLanguages Conference," an annual event that brings together lots of folks involved in language teaching in SL. You can take a look at the content of previous conferences at http://www.slanguages.net

  19. I think you have to do something very, very wicked to be punished by moderatorhood. I also believe that actually "wanting" to be one automatically disqualifies an applicant. As does being sane. I would rather sleep with a cactus on a bed of nails while having my teeth pulled sans anaesthetic than be a moderator. And I'm pretty sure the actual moderators here would agree :smileywink:

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