We're Off To See The Wizard...

I appreciate the title of this blog is Sigmund Leominster on Second Life, and that what follows is not about Second Life, but you should also remember that this is MY blog and I'm free to do what I want with it. You're therefore free to stop reading now and hop back in-world until maybe 15th April 2008 when I'm pretty much sure to be back on track with all-Second Life all-the-time. Until then, you're going to find references to SL oblique rather than directly experiential.

That's because Siggy is on the road in the land of Oz and the Apple Island, which is, as I have now discovered, one of the Australian nicknames for New Zealand. And while I'm working hard (honest) in the antipodes, accessing SL may be more limited.


I'll be tossing in some pictures of the trip for the curious, none of which will actually include the Man Behind the Puppet; after all, this is "Sigmund Leominster's" site and not... well, whatever, his name is. Of course, a smart detective type willing to spend time and money might gather enough clues to work out who I really am, but honestly, it's not worth it. I am neither rich nor famous in RL so don't waste your time.

So here's clue number one; and aerial shot of the approach to Sydney with the iconic Opera House front and center. It's a little blurry on the left because your intrepid traveler (Sir Sigmund of Leominster, Vampire Hunter) was stuffed real close to the wing and so the heat from the engine was warping the air. Now you can work out where I was sitting and then check the passenger manifest of all flights to Sydney on that day. Good luck!

Short, Lonely, and Quiet: Me or the Day?

Maybe it's the mid-week thing but last night was peculiarly subdued. After an early visit to Merry's place with my good buddies, I logged off to do some RL stuff - taxes, anyone? - and then visit the RL pub. When I got back on late, and it's always late in Second Life, things were quiet. I spent a lot of time at my house trying to see if I could improve the streaming music: I couldn't. Then I tried to fix a prim collar on a great sweater I have: I couldn't. This was in line with my earlier attempts to create a transparent cushion for a chair, which... yes, you guessed: I couldn't.

As with RL, you can spend some days in Second Life in something of a funk. Things feel weird; stuff doesn't happen; logging off seems to be the rational thing to do.

I ended the day with Mony and MTD at the Linden Balloon platform, a neutral safe haven for all the folks I know, talking about the economics of Second Life. Or possible lack thereof.

Then it got late. It's always late in Second Life. The day was short, lonely, and quiet. Like this posting.

The Pub With No Beer

My friend Merry Felwitch has been bitten by the pub bug. Not the loud, brash, stripper-infested, pick-up dive with more tip jars than room to dance and a crushing throng of sweaty avatars "arooga-ing" and "whoot-ing" as DJ Whothehellcares gives another shout out to the last fool to drop him a few lindens, but a cross between a Middle Ages tavern and a Victorian watering hole. And L$10 for anyone who can parse that last sentence.

The pub is, I believe, being built around a sign. Sardonicus Hax created a pub sign for Merry called The Merry Inn, and such a charming and welcoming sign deserves to have a pub attached to it. So aided and hindered by myself and the intriguing Mony Markova, Merry spent a fair chunk of time having stuff rezzed, derezzed, manipulated, and destroyed. That destruction included parts of the house, but then if you have Mony with you, that sort of thing isn't uncommon.

Still, we managed somehow to deal with fixing the crooked bar, the wonky jukebox, the dance table (I said no strippers but you have to have a least ONE table for folks to strut their funky stuff on) and leave the place still standing without setting off the sprinkler system.

Keep an eye out for the official opening to the SL public. Soon?

Hitting the Triple Play

There's a saying that everything comes in threes and today is a great example. In an ego-massaging twist of fate, today sees the simultaneous release of three articles in the SL sphere. The first in the the always-scandalous-never-boring Second Life Herald. The piece is called "Vanity The First Deadly SL Sin" and is the first (hopefully) of a seven-part set that looks the Seven Deadly Sins and how to break them in Second Life.

The second is a look at the opening of a new sim in Chelsea, London and published in issue 14 of FreeLife Magazine. There you'll find a replica of Westminster's famous Big Ben clock tower and have the opportunity to ride a flying double-decker open-top bus. The sim is next door to Knightsbridge, a great shopping and entertainment area.

The third is in the more business-orientated SLentrepreneur and is a comment on Linden Lab's latest press release on controlling their trademarks and copyrights. Are LL moving towards an IPO later this year? It seems so and that's one of the points I make in the article.

You'll find that they are all fundamentally different types and styles of article. But that's the point of being a freelancer! I can switch from the trivially tongue-in-cheek tabloid style of The Herald to the much more analytical and formal style of SLentrepreneur. It's too early to be pigeon-holed.

Keep an eye open for the next Deadly Sin in the Herald, another clothing review in issue 15 of FreeLife, and lots of analysis and commentary in SLentrepreneur. Oh, and I want to get at least one in the SL Enquirer, who I have avoided so far not because they are not good but because they don't pay quite as well ;)

Mercenary, moi?

More Dancing, More Death

Last night started with dancing at the space station home of Willa, in orbit some 4000 m above the earth. Along with Mony, MTD, and Sardonicus, I strutted my funky stuff and engaged in some dances that were more reminiscent of the catwalk than a spacewalk. Still, once you're shaking your groove thing with a bunch of buddies, who cares if you're dancing like a female stripper, right?


Perversely, being in high places always gets me thinking of jumping. Call it a Death Wish, call is simple craziness, but Willa's space station was practically begging me to use it for another trip on the Suicide Express. And Sardonicus was happy to assist!

It turns out that Sardo has been working on a small, rideable spaceship that was currently still in beta test. For "beta test" read "could go in any direction at any time and explode into a million shiny sparks of hot fire." Sounded good to me. And hey, I'd never tried my hand at being a test pilot, so...

I flew to the top of the space station and rezzed the flyer. Yes, you can still breathe in space and no, you don't explode in the zero atmosphere. Shame really - another interesting suicide.

Right click. Fly.

In less time than it takes to hit the PAGE DOWN button, I was hurtling towards earth in a spiral of death. In truth, the "spiral" required me to use the arrow keys as controllers... but you get what I mean. I was able to watch the height figures tumble at the top of my screen, trying to work out just how long I had to live.

As I entered through the clouds I could see a shoreline: I was either going to hit ground or hit ocean. Splat or splash. Remember that in Real Life, flying is actually very easy - it's not hitting the ground that's tricky.

Seconds to go and the altimeter read 25 m. And I stopped! Some damned safety control had kicked in so that I could have a safe landing. But that's precisely what I didn't want! I wanted to end up as a smear of red and white across several square meters of sandbox. Tragically that dramatic demise was wrenched from my suicidal grasp.

Death, where is thy sting.

Is That Really You Talking?

After months of avoiding it, last night I gave in for a short while to the Voice feature of Second Life. Donning my headset, I enabled the chat along with my friends mtd1952 Timeless and Merry Felwitch, along with a new guy, Charlez Caproni. An odd experience for me, to say the least. Hearing MTD and Merry for the first time since I started back in November 2007 was surprising. Not because they didn't sound like I expected - and I honestly had no expectations - but because suddenly it became more like a phone call, all be it rather distorted and fiddly.

The mechanics of "push to talk" and having voices clash felt awkward. I also felt like we tacitly acknowledged we had to take turns in order to be heard. The lack of non-verbal cues such as eye contact and facial expression also made it feel odd. It wasn't unpleasant - just unusual.

The other thing that gets in the way of my using voice is that I have a family who sleep! My computer is located such that it wouldn't be long before someone would be telling me to be quiet. Maybe it's also significant that I am not much of a phone person anyway. In RL, I do a LOT of face-to-face teaching and talking so that's really more comfortable for me. I can run online presentations and use Skype happily on a one-to-one. But I think I'm not ready for a significant amount of SL chatting. I'm sure there will be occasions when it makes sense, however replacing my Typonese with Voice is a long way off.


If nothing else, I am more certain that MTD is a guy and Merry is a gal. Although you can use voice changing software - apparently - I understand that it is obvious; so you really can't be a guy pretending to be a gal.

And another thing: I suddenly felt my real-life self beginning to replace my Second Life persona. Sure, Sigmund Leominster and "me" have things in common, but I don't want SL to be just a copy of RL. After Voice would come video, and then Siggy is gone and "I" am there - which I don't want. My Second Life is precisely that; a Second Life.

Best to try keep the two apart as much as possible for as long as possible. At this moment in time, the podcast is voice enough for me.

Ladybird, Ladybird, Fly Away Home...

It's an old English nursery rhyme from the 18th century:

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.

As with most good nursery rhymes and fairy stories, the tale is very grim and there is no happy ending. In our sanitized 21st century awash with political correctness and drowning in feel-good revisionism, it's instructive to go back to the good-old-days when fairy stories would scare the shit out of kids and stories would end with people being killed, eaten, lost, or possibly all three.

Here is Second Life, the grim and the tragic is still alive and kicking, despite the banning of gambling and banking. Only yesterday my friend IMed me to say that she had accidentally burned down the house. No, she was not at a dance ("We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn") nor listening to Talking Heads ("There has got to be a way, burning down the house." No, turns out she attached to the wall a torch that she had picked up free some months ago, only to find that it contained a script for raising homes to the ground.

Fortunately only the house burned down and not the entire sim: Try explaining that to the neighbors!

And the moral of this cautionary tale? Buy fireproof houses and be very very careful with free stuff - you don't know where it's been.