So, waxing grandiloquent this morning, what we're doing in Second Life is writing the biggest piece of open-ended fiction there is. This ol' Real Life is 'way bigger, of course, but it's non-fiction. And I've always been a fan of fiction, of the kind of fiction that has flying things and robots and teleportation and unicorns and magic spells and stuff like that especially. (Real Life will have those things eventually, in some to-be-determined sense, but I'm impatient.)
Okay, so I blush a little at getting that gradiloquent, and at considering writing here about how I fully expect that this kind of thing will radically transform human experience over the next decade or so, but I mean sheesh!
As an example of what a Serious Cultural Phenomenon this is, here's a picture of a couple of virtual women dressed like Christmas elves.
(That's me on the right, flexy-ears and all.)
In between dressing up funny, I've also been building stuff now and then. My current favorite thing (well, right up there with the gallery that I built for artist friend Noelani and then rebuilt from pieces when the infrastructure decided to remove it from her land and deliver it to her pocket in fragments) is this Roger-Dean-inspired bunch of floating rocks:
That's me meditating on the main island, under the tree, 400 meters in the air. It's not all that good a picture (the angle that I had to take it from to get nearly the whole build into the shot rather distorts the perspective), but it gives the general idea.
(The Roger Dean link above, by the way, leads to some interesting stuff that I wasn't aware of about the way-cool pictures that Dean did for Yes.)
And one more recent SL picture, jes 'cause I like posting pictures of pretty girls. *8)
Speaking of fiction, I'm reading and greatly enjoying Charles Stross's "Glasshouse", one of the two Strosses that I got for Solstice. It's way-future hi-tech stuff, which I apparently love. (I also got his "Halting State", and finished it the other day, and while it was fun it was more immediate-future and the ideas in it weren't as mind-stretching; I like having my mind stretched.)
I'm also considering whether to buy Rudy Rucker's "Postsingular" now, or wait until it comes out in paperback (or even until it shows up free in the rack downstairs at the lab). The basic premise sounds like fun, and I've enjoyed various Rucker things in the past, but from the reviews it sounds like it goes off into silliness when it gets to the really difficult parts, which is what's disappointed me about some of Rucker's more recent stuff.
So I dunno.
I've been neglecting various Real Life things lately, like the fact that my car needs a checkup and the piles of New York Times Book Reviews are taking over the world again (but not, I hope, neglecting the fact that the little daughter has this annoyingly persistent cold, or that college applications are coming due, or that the little boy is still fascinated by all things Paintball), and various webloggish things like reader input in general and the Ajax Toy in particular.
At the latter place, a generous reader gives us what is perhaps a Mia update:
She barfed again over the side, the rough gunwales splintering her hands, salting the wounds. Better this than the flea-infested cabin and that disgusting capitano. Capitano... phwwtt... she spat the rest the barf out and gulped some spume to cleanse her mouth. The Straits of St. Nicholas of Tolentine aptly named indeed. How long would she have to endure this pitiful piecemeal vision of purgatory?
Poor Mia! But the rest of us get to go off and read about St. Nicholas of Tolentine and admire her for her erudition, and I hope that makes up for it...
Breaking News: Just before posting this we received word that the FDA has declared meat from cloned animals to be safe for eating. I think this is a positive step, with obvious economic benefits. Previously, when a 50-foot cow clone with slimy tentacles, glowing red eyes, and an insatiable lust for human flesh attacked the city, and was ultimately defeated by heroic scientists and/or teenagers, all of its meat would have to be disposed of at municipal expense. But with this new ruling, those tons of steaming ex-clone flesh can be sold to local meat packers, who will efficiently slice it up and cart it off, to be sold to the public as healthy foodstuffs.
Welcome once again to the XXIst Centurity an' all!
