So!
The little daughter saw "Fight Club" somewhere, and she read the book, and then she insisted that some of the rest of us see it, so she and I watched it on M's MacBook or something on the big bed the other day (with M lying there stitching but not officially watching). I had expected it to be sort of distasteful violence-porn (the same way that I imagine those "Rocky" movies and stuff to be), and imagine my surprise when it wasn't actually that but something else entirely, and actually very good.
I won't say anything more than that, to avoid spoiling it in case you're one of the six people on the planet who don't know all about it yet.
Also lying about on the bed, the four of us watched some Home Videos from when the little daughter was actually little, from when the little boy was below his mother's shin instead of above his mother's head, and so on. It was amazingly fun and funny, and made me think poignantly about how short a time we have before this sort of all-four thing can only happen when the little daughter is home visiting (aaaaaahh!).
Ehem.
In Second Life, I actually tried out Voice under extreme pressure (i.e. someone that I like said that I should). It was neat and fun in some sense, hearing those three actual voices of three actual people. It didn't have one of the negatives that I expected, in that all three of the voices sounded about like I imagined them as sounding previously, and my mental images of the people involved haven't changed.
On the other hand it did have many of the negatives that I mentioned the other week. Since I was on the big bed with the family (watching the US Open, talking about stuff, etc), it would have been rude and/or embarassing for me to be talking, so I was only listening on voice, and talking by typing. Even then, I had to have earbuds on to hear the SL voices, so I tended to miss the RL voices and get exasperated eye-rolls (even more than usual heh heh) from M and kids.
The "breaking the fantasy" thing wasn't a big problem; I was a boy in SL at the time so even if I had talked it wouldn't have been terribly dissonant. The folks in SL who were talking all sounded plausibly like they looked, humans of the corresponding probable genders and all. There was one mysterious clattering noise that I cammed around looking for the source of in SL for awhile before realizing that it was one of the voicing people typing on their computer in Glasgow or Austin or somewhere.
We were all pretty polite people, so the "voice favors the rude" problem didn't come up, thankfully. On the other hand the inability to scroll back was a definite problem, in that I lost significant stretches of the conversation because I was distracted for a second, or the voice stream jittered, or I didn't understand someone's adorable accent, and I didn't want to interrupt to say "sorry, what was that?" all the time when all I'd missed might have been an obscure wisecrack or something else that the speaker might already have forgotten.
And similarly music wasn't a problem because this wasn't a club or anything but just us sitting there listening to the seagulls, but my inability to reliably understand multiple people with adorable accents all speaking or laughing or giggling at once was a significant problem (see previous paragraph).
So my first real experience with voice in SL hasn't done anything to undo my qualms about it. Another friend who is very fond of voice has said that she disagrees with my notecard, and promises me a spirited discussion at some point in the future. In text-chat, I hope. *8)
Yet two more pictures of ME ME ME ME from flickr:
(Hm, I'm not sure if the boy is that skinny, or if I've messed up the aspect ratio on that latter picture. It's all just pixels anyway.)
Speaking of pixels, What are you celebrating?:
f
f
something sort of smirking or supercillious
Discardia
Yay, f!
