Discussions

I've been spending a great deal of time thinkng about my second life. And it is tiem to make some changes, but also for me to do a few things that I think are lacking. One is covering discussion in SL better. So from now on, when I can, i will be attending as many discussions as possible, and blogging about them.

Tomorrow:

The 1970s film Soylent Green depicted a grim future in which a massively overpopulated Earth had been almost utterly ruined by intensive farming, deforestation and fishing. Food prices are so high only the superich can afford fresh meat, fruit and veg, while the masses eat a bland substance called Soylent Green (which turns out to be made from the corpses of dead people!).

Will this grim tale always remain just fiction? Come and discuss with Extropia. All welcome.

1530 SLT

Sex Scandal of the Day

New York Governor all but admits he solicited a high end prostitute.

I have friends who tell me there are Repugnicans and Dumbocrats. And today seems to be an argument for the second of those at least....

Sosumi

I've changed the ad strip. I was goth once. Sosumi.

What's wrong with this picture?

Three Linden Opera: Then I'll be a Star!

(Generally I don't have anything to say about the music in this, but for very specific reasons I want this number to be based on tunes from Marche Slav)

Crowd:
What's going on?
Something is up!
Something is wrong!
Have you heard the rumors?
Does anyone know?
We don't know what to do, or which way to go!

Prokofiev Never:
I know what's going on.

Crowd:
Can you tell us?

Prokfiev Never:
(spoken)
I will tell you, because I can,
About their evil plan.
First they'll ban casinos,
And as every body knows,
Then they'll ban sex,
And we will come to blows.
Then they will require,
Before the coming of the snows
Everyone to wear latex
And cut off all their toes!

(Crowd)
Who? How?

Prokfiev Never:
You'll have to listen closely,
Because it's hard to understand,
But I will lay it out,
In the palm of my hand.

(sung)
It's a sexual sickness,
Combined with a terminal hipness,
That's killing all the commerce,
And strangling all the business

To be right, it is my fate,
If they would listen to me,
Before it's too late.
All the world would then realize
The plain truth right before their eyes.
Away with conspiracies,
And undiscovered lies.

Away with conspiracies,
And undiscovered lies.

This place is locked
In a the trap of Leninists,
And the Age players
That are on their supporter lists.
It's age playing Leninists,
And the evil nanny state,
So rally to my banner,
We're headed for failure,
at a terrifying rate!

Follow my words carefully,
As I've wandered all the worlds endlessly,
And to the rulers of them all I, mercilessly,
Handed out the punishment deservedly.

With gods I've wrestled,
With demons I have spared,
When in fame I'm nestled
Then I'll be a star!

And where ever I have gone,
The same, the same thing has been wrong,
Age playing Leninists, you'll find them by the spate,
Who run the evil feted core, and the nanny state.

Hunt down the age playing Leninists,
And there will be smiles,
Destroy the dangerous nanny state,
With it's evil wiles.

I've hounded high and mighty,
And exposed their blunders,
With polished prose brightly,
Which I will say modestly,
Is among the metaversal wonders.

If you follow me through,
Then you will go far,
Then I'll have my due,
And I'll be a star!

Hunt the age playing Leninists,
And keep our teens safe,
Down with the nanny state,
With their casino hate.

Everything is a plot
To get more than what you've got,
And I live by the only creed,
To bash back every other greed,
I have what I have,
and you'll give yours to me.

Let's look at all the building going on
Can't you see that's completely wrong,
Their using up your resources
It's too me that they belong.

It's a conspiracy of Leninists,
With their destructive wiles,
Age playing nanny state,
With their false smiles.

I know all there is to know
And written brilliant tracts.
I've uncovered the under tow
The Lolita-Leninist party backs
Because I think it so
Those are the facts!

Once you follow all my orders,
You'll be free to go far,
Once there are no more Leninists,
Then I'll be a star!

Down with age playing Leninists,
With their evil smiles,
Down with the nanny state,
And it's destructive wiles!

So when you are all free,
Then I'll be a star.
Follow my orders,
And then I'll be a czar.

In the Pink a raging success

One of the first second life original theatrical productions as been a raging success, with its last scheduled performance already filling up.

1.19 Asstatchment Count

Oh I am soo into dp with heels... it's sl favorite kinky sex act.

Asstatchment count since being forced over to 1.19 24 hours ago: 2 3 4 5
Asstatchments in three months of Nicholaz: 0

Also a crash about every hour or so.

This release is an unqualified catastrophe.

Three Linden Opera:In the Beginning

Rebecca:

Once upon a time, so the story starts,
A divided time in minds and in hearts,
We, by rote, played little parts,
In a cosmic tragedy.

Then there was a world virtual
Where they lusted for forbidden virtu

Among the first of many meta-places
There we moved, and we had faces,
That were made of digital.

But we don't live there any more,
It's part of history,
Part of now, don't you see
It what was once a seed,
And now is tree.
It what was once a flower,
And now is field of blossoms.

It was filled with crowding slew,
Who sought it's pleasures
And by a few,
who mined its treasures,
That's what they do.
It was the only way they knew.

In this newling place, by kismet kissed
There was an woman who was a writer,
And words created her antagonist,
Who through his pain brought her terror.

And they locked in petty war.

But lust and fear they are such engines,
Of too many beginnings to mention,
They forgot what would come before.
And they' live forever more.
A song over lethe's silent roar.

Thus began a stranger odyssey,
Turned by supple hand that is more than destiny,
The shapes our ends as she will,
Rough hewn though are until…

And what happened you will see.

So the tale is told,
So new and yet now old,
How love for pretty pennies is seldom sold,
How dreams are born and then they must fold.

And who am I?
I was there, then,
I am there now,
your humble narrator...
a cousin to Virgil.
Attending to my vigil,
of those who sigh,
and those who cry,
and yet must try
to rise again and soar.

That is what we have in store,
There really isn't any more.

Event at the Kama Sutra Institute

Shruytian has a new blog, and a new project... combining sex with intelligence in second life...

This is the inaugural round-table discussion for the Kama Sutra Institute. Our topic will be the pursuit of pleasure in SL--the many forms it takes, how it differs or aligns with 1st life, and to what ends it is taken.

Three Linden Opera: Nonogamy

Lead Girl:

It's not the exclusivity...
or even in the end, the monotony.
The truth is, marriage is not about fidelity,
but in the end ... nonogamy!

Let's face it you're a chump,
once a month is worse than many monks!
The difficulties pile up!
And when you get it it's abrupt,
or perhaps the kids will interupt!

So don't play games with an old roleplay
that's come and gone and had it's day,
Really marriage is a bore,
a kid of socially imposed chore,
we don't need it any more,
when laid out before you...
is a smorgasbord.

Have a long one, then a short one,
try them out in thin or wide,
swirl around and feel them inside,
you never know if you've gone wrong,
until you've tried all the options on.

Maybe you like them thin,
Maybe you like them strong.
What matters if they can get it in,
And know how to keep it long…

Why should you beg?
When there are all these prospects,
It's a shame to waste a night,
When they don't even put up a fight!

So don't be Victorian,
Or a study for a historian,

Pierce your ears, or pierce your nose,
Put bling on your fingers and on your toes,
Pierce your nipples, I confess
You aren't really daring unless
You've pierced your… well take a guess.

It's all the same in here,
What do you have to fear?
Shed the pounds and shed the years…
No reason for the trauma and the tears!

No reason to be a malcontent
Or fill your dreams with deep portents,
Keep it shallow
Keep it clean
Sometimes sweet,
And sometimes mean.

Try the orgies,
or group sex,
be a witch and cast a hex,
try the other gender out,
have a tail, or have a snout.
Why not a darker experiment,
you'll be so happy,
you'll forget, where all the hours, got up and went.

It's not unreal,
It's what you feel,
And listen, here is the deal,
What's the competition really then?
A lost and fizzled old passion.

So you can hold me in infamy,
while I'll writhe in ecstasy
I've no time, for nonogamy.

Who we are.

We are all immersionists, we are all augmentationists, we are all experimentalists.

Rheta Shan writes in a discursive and confessional way, it's a heart felt and searching cynosure of conversation, around which swirls many strands. It is a wonder to be able to hold so many voices in one head, and then be able to spin them out so respendently:

So we should stop asking ourselves if there is a fine point to be made between immersion and non-immersion. There is not. Second Life is an immersive world. The most advanced and most powerful to date, because while it does nothing as well as specialised ones, it does make nearly anything possible. Its power has nothing to do with how much we want to disclose about our RL selves, or how much we care for the impact it might have on society at large. And no, it’s not separate of the atomic world, obviously, but it doesn’t have to be to stand on its own : not anymore than the colonies of his gracious majesty, the King of England, had to be separate of this globe we live on. That hasn’t stopped them getting quite headstrong first, autonomous against the will of his not-so-graceful-anymore majesty a tad later.

Rheta Shan

Artificial divides often create the most excitement. The Hillary-Obama fight being one example: the smaller the differences, the bigger the emotive drama that wraps around them. The reality is that any one in second life must want a better life, an augmentaiton of that life, and any one must immerse themselves in the minutae of inventory and the rest of the things that make up second life, or any VR. We are all also involved in an experiment in the creation of virtual community.

I feel the best way to look at this is to view one's core as "the player." The player creates an analog avatar, a series of identities which mix physical, social, and conventional aspects. The web of relationships are often hard to tease apart, but all one needs to do is have a bout of identity theft, and it becomes obvious how interwoven with virtual elements even the most concrete of ourselves is.

Player's also create all kinds of virtual selves, as writers, as pages in social networking sites, as avatars. To create a virtual self is to be immersed in that self. Academic writing is immersive, and no on actually speaks the way they write an actual paper, and those that try tend to be regarded as socially inept. Virtual reality, or the realities of virutality, make it so.

In my world of escorting I divide people into a spectrum. There are hook ups, look ups, back ups, and screw ups. The last is sometimes replaced by a stronger word depending on my mood and their behavior.

A hook up wants a meeting in the flesh, or some in the flesh advantage right now. An advertiser, an asler, a hiring manager all have something in common: they want something physical to happen now, or soon.

A look up is not adverse to in the flesh meeting, but as some degree of space. They don't want a proton thing to happen right now. Most people are actually some degree of look up, in that the right incentive will draw almost anyone out. It might not happen, or be practical, but it is there. Putting yourself on facebook is like that. It's not happy to get a

heh hot stuff! I'll be in your area next week, and I was wondering if you wanna have some hot fun with me!

in your in box. Really, that's not what it is there for. However, getting a note from someone who likes your writing, which leads to a conversation, which leads to a casual invitation for coffee one day, is a different thing.

Then there are back ups. We are all in this mode sometimes. If someone makes an approach, a back up tells the other person to back up, and realize that's not what this is about. Any time a spam message comes into your email box, I will bet you want the other person to back up and learn some manners.

Then there are screw ups. A screw up is someone who simply doesn't understand that there are other people with their own needs involved. A person who gets offended when every girl he spams won't go on msn right now, is a screw up. A person who uses anonymity ot make death threats or grief people, is a screw up. Immersionist? Augmentationist? In a manner of speaking, but really, just a problem.

Does the immersionist/augmentationist divide have any use? Yes, in that there are people who take the stance that nothing here should be taken seriously, that it is all disposable and just another venue for their player. Then there are others who want to feel through this narrow doorway, and want the fourth wall to be thick. Though, as I've said, who is what in which circumstances, varies.

However, it is, for me, the experimentalist aspect which overwhelms the other two most of all. The ability to re-imagine the self, based on new possibilities, and the burden of having to work through a new geography of problems and challenges, is something that focuses my mind far more often. And yours too I think.

Sophrosyne has had a rough week with a gale of the problems from rl, and how people want. One reason for this is that the engine of prejudice is time. People want things to be in nice consumable packages, and that includes other people. We are all off the rack dresses. They want the signs that trigger a certain behavior to be out and visible, and without thought, reachable. Wearing a short skirt? It must be because it is OK for them to flirt. In a bar late at night? Then it must be because making a pass is alright. And so on.

This desire to put people in little boxes with clear markings does not go away just because a player enters a virtual world and acts through a digital avatar. Many players also want to push the costs of their searching on to others, like, for example, the men who want to proposition virtually every woman they meet, or pinch … well you get the idea. These people get very angry if they have to think at all before trying to grab what appeals to them.

This is a more important divide that aug/im, in my experience. There are people who want to restrain the information that others see, and there are people who want to be able to demand, or ignore the warning flags, of others. This is one of the things that makes the aug/im split seem worse than it is. Immersionists are almost by their nature restrainers of the very information that this class of unthinking people shoppers want to have, and take most offense when a less than well mannered people shopper wants to pick up the box and fondle it without asking.

I'm being casual about this, because I really believe that in not too long a time, what I am saying here will be common sense. I've heard the same thing from many other people in different forms, so it isn't as if this is something unique to me, or original to my thoughts. However, perhaps because I am in the business end of dealing with rather highly charged examples of it, I don't have patience for excessive academicization of the subject, or drah-mah about what is really people seeking their needs in a new medium.

We are all trying to make our lives, plural, better. We are all deep in this new world, which Second Life is a reflection of. We are all taking hesitant steps into a darkness that with our luminosity, becomes a new light.

Some days

There is only one place to be... with the people who have lost.

One of my friends has started a most interesting referral service... and one which fills, I think, a niche... if only people will take advantage of it. Since I have gotten here,or at least not long after I have gotten here, many people have asked whether it would be possible to provide actual escorting, or courtesan services. Well, I think Shrutiyan Anatra is about to test the idea. I've seen exclusive access for discerning patrons work, but the relentless churn of the demand for free pulls against it. Can we have erotica to match the already present porn? I don't know... but I would like to find out.

But a society can not long last if if demands that people pay to play and for pixels, but tells them that what they contribute to the world, is free for the taking.

Kama Sutra Institute
~~~ Kama Sutra Bhavan ~~~ A *Private* Learning Institution
and Kama Sutra Couture - ethnic fashion

‘Where are you going, beautiful hips … to whose body will those swelling close-set breasts of yours like the golden goblets grant their touch? Who will mount swiftly into your broad secret parts, that are like a great golden wheel enclosed in a golden band, the embodiment of heaven?’ ~~ The Ramayana

Welcome to The Kama Sutra Institute, where the pursuit of pleasure in SL is put in the proper perspective of Dharma, Artha and Kama. In this tradition, sexual desire is recognized as innately and simply divine in nature, and the pursuit of earthly delight as crucial in the karmic cycle as any other social or spiritual pursuit; the ancient sages acknowledged that the sexual act itself elevated the spirit to that realm of bliss from which all of creation was engendered. Our activities will include round-table discussions, learning workshops, private study and our own retail clothing line.

Please IM me with a request to join the Kama Sutra Institute group.
There are three main sections:

Apsaras, our referral service for 'celestial courtesans'; able to seduce the most pious saddhu…in the epics there are tales of penitents who were so fired with lust at the mere sight of these heavenly nymphs that they were immediately thrown into orgasm.

Maharajas, the select patrons of our coterie. Maharajas, in addition to enjoying the benefit of our divine company, are treated to special members-only performances and lectures at the Institute.

Kama Sutra Couture members enjoy updates and freebies from our fashion line. Kama Sutra Couture is dedicated to provideing the finest in Indian ethnic fashion and the best possible customer service. If you feel strongly about the work, please nominate me for the Best New Designer category at the Merovingi Fashion Awards:


MFA
All the best,
Shrutiyan Anatra

Hamlet Draws Attention to a lovely space.

Exquisite.

Huge Prim USers... You have got to vote on JIRA SVC-1760

Hollow has been rebroken in 1.19

Do you use huge prims? Live some place that uses huge prims? Then you have got to vote up this JIRA. We need the capability of complex hollow... Need.

Talked to Sidewinder Linden and Andrew Linden... they were incredibly understanding and took a copy too look at. I'm hopeful we can get this fixed.

Thank you Sidewinder and Andrew!

Required Downgrade to 1.19

This isn't a week conducive to my faith in LL's technical people. First they pushed Yedo back to Havok1, now I find out that I need to downgrade back to an asstatchment vesion of the viewer.

"Is your second life experience getting better or worse?"

Blocked on a major building project and about to get used to pulling heels out of my ass again... WORSE!

I just got an email... in fact we are still on H4 and they have

Broken huge prims again.

This makes me so furious. Just beyond angry. Version 1.19 is a disaster both on the server side and on the client side. Bugs bugs bugs bugs... Just absolutely horrible.

How is it that software gets worse as it goes away from beta? What is going on?

That does it... jira time...

In Praise of Piracy

It's articles like this that make me think that there is a don't get it gene.

If you tell consumers that their's is all the risk for buying content, then they won't buy it, they will pirate it. And in fact, that's what I thought of when reading the HD-DVD cries. "Rip them, put them in some hard drive plays it format, and move along." After all, that is where your blue-ray and everything else are going to end up. I know the content industry wants the nice model of a machine that only does one thing, that they can easily control, and they can force you to rebuy the same songs and movies over and over and over and over again forever and ever and ever. I don't like this model, and what's more many other people who are good programmers don't like it either.

When content providers stop trying to cheat content buyers, then piracy won't look very attractive. As long as it is a game of people trying to cheat each other, the pirate will keep coming back, because, like any other interference in the buying and selling of things, there will be an adjustment by other means. Ration a good below what production allows, and get a black market. It's not the pirate or the black marketer that keeps things going, it is the person who is out several thousand dollars and told "sucker!" While there are swindles, it doesn't seem to be a very good idea to have the law involved in protecting them.

Am I in favor of piracy? No, absolutely not. But I'm not in favor of destroying someone's life at 700 US Dollars per song pirated either. It's not creative people who, in the end, are most protected by the system we have, I know lots of very creative people who are not getting very much money, but the large maze of pipes that siphon creative energy and push it into the waiting... hmmm.. orifices? of consumers...

Current laws and rates are not about protecting the water, but the sewer system...

We need to change that, and we need to change it in a way that more creative people are paid more, rather than a few paid a great deal because they stand on the opening of one of those pipes... and the pipe owners paid most of all.

A simple google search tells me that it is possible...

Don't ask me what the jargon means, I don't know.What I do know is that if you tell a person they've lost something that they paid for and that buying content legally makes you "a sucker," then there's no reason for them not to run up the jolly roger.

Novel Novels

Call them obitchuaries... The articles about someone's death that show up at the funeral in a gothic costume and cry out "I'm so glad your dead." And drop some wilted flowers on the grave. OK so a friend fed me on super hero movies last night. Blame netflicks.

Les Gommes is my favorite. (Of the novels, not the super hero films.) Le Voyeur is also excellent. What Robbe-Grillet can teach us, in the present, is how to focus with obsessive attention on description and detail, and let the observer figure ot what is the emotional substance. It's a lesson that could be well learned for acting in a VR, because emoting something like

/me thinks about how the particles are ebbing back and forth in an annoying fashion.

Isn't going to arouse anyone. The contra-novelistic style, the repetition of objective descriptions, is our world in SL. How many affairs have begun on the endless loop repetition of ballroom 1, with the variation coming form only the shifting of point of view and the thin line of dialog? Robbe-Grillet's world, is more like ours than we might suspect.

Stephen Marche has written an obitchuary on Alain Robbe-Grillet. I like the novels of Robbe-Grillet, but agree with Marche's assessment of what can be called a false purism of construction. While denying that a novel should have a philosophy, he very much puts forward a philosophy of novels. It's one that is applicable to VR:

The two strands of postwar literary fiction, the ultraradical and the willfully archaic, are both antithetical to the spirit of the novel itself, which is polyglot and unpredictable. Novels are supposed to be messy. They are written to express ideals and to make money; they steal from everything and everyone, high, middle and low, belonging to everyone and no one in the same moment. They don't fit anyone's conception. That's why we love them.

It's here, in a positive statement, that I find myself nodding my head in agreement with Marche. The problem with avantie gestures and stances, is that it isn't accurate. Second Life isn't populated by people who are too smart for the real world, while some of them are, but people who see... something, and often they are not quite sure what. The problem with avant-garde as a notion then, is that it implies a kind of person who isn't present in the edge of society.

The term, of course, is an implication that there are people who live in the future, and that they are like the forward guard of a vast army marching in revolution. I'm suspicious of military metaphors, because an army doesn't bring life, but death. It is, by it's nature, and adjunct to a living growing society, or the doom of one. Often the society that created it. Instead, I think that colonizer and frontier metaphors are better. That Secodn Life is "A City on the Edge of Forever." Not populated by barrel chested men out of soviet socialist realism with their upstanding hardened wives, but by people who are bit by bit trying to raise a continent of activity.

This is, necessarily, a messy activity. It necessarily steals from every place.

[While writing this, I had a very avantie moment, the writer of Robbe-Grillet's obituary for the Guardian died after writing it, probably it had been mostly written years before. What tells me this is that it mentions a last work, which, of course, was no longer the last work, but no one checked that at the time. The modern novel is filled with people doing things automatically and then putting them into the system and letting it run. So a living man wrote an obituary of a living man that was accurate, and the dead man writing about a dead man was inaccurate... The mistake was made in something that was not done, namely checking the file copy of the obituary before running it. We don't know who didn't make this mistake... It's a very modern moment...]

Virtuality?

It's hard to say what to think. Because so many things are touched upon, and very little is said. So while Brian Dipert wants thoughts, i can only give impressions, since it isn't clear exactly what he is saying. Other than perhaps he thinks that second life is over-hyped. I think his piece is the kind of knee jerk terror of virtual reality that I read too much of, poorly argued and reading for all the world like a text in favor of prohibition of alcohol because so many people drink too much.

So let me get at what I think is the core of the problem:

Human beings, like many if not all creatures, seem to have a natural compulsion to intoxicate themselves in striving to escape the un-pleasurable aspects of real life and instead flee (albeit temporarily) to a seemingly 'better' alternative. We cling to what feels good, and we push away what feels bad...not realizing, as we do so, that this grasping and aversion is at the root of our suffering...but I digress. Yes, I'm taking you down a blue pill/red pill Matrix scenario here.

People are already fleeing to virtual worlds, even in their imperfect states, and in spite of the fact that, as is the case with chat rooms, USENET groups, and other artifacts of cyberspace, most if not all cyber-worlds seem to rapidly degrade to anarchistic real world look-alikes. Heck, some scholars hypothesize that there's a statistically significant possibility that we already exist in a virtual world (yep, Matrix again). Why wouldn't people flee to them more often, and more people flee to them, as they become more compelling over time and technology evolution?

The first problem is that I don't think anyone could make a strong case about "all creatures." Maybe some creatures are capable of creating imaginary spaces that are compelling enough to retreat into, and many intelligent creatures play and dream. But all? Hmmm. Not last I checked animal psychology. Androids may dream of electric sheep, but fish just swim and eat.

Now, about fleeing into a "better" alternative. I'm not sure that this holds water. If we have the capability to construct a virtuality, then there must be reasons for that capability. Perhaps not the uses we have put it to, but we have it because the sum and total of the interactions with the world, left behind... us. So the argument that we are "fleeing" a real world for an inferior one is lacking. Now it could be argued, and later the author does argue, that the virtual worlds we are making fall short of utility, and criticism, even harsh criticism, is definitely in order. But the project of creating virtual selves, has been going on as long as people could carve bits of rock and bone into forms, and in words since people created prose. The first time a king erected a rock to his own name, and described events as he thinks they should have gone... well, he created a virtual self.

So while people may "flee" to virtual selves, the reason for fleeing isn't necessarily merely escapism. In fact, I'd argue that second life is largely not created by escapism, even if many people populating it are there for escape. Nor would evolution permit such a large drain on energy as mere escapism.

I could spin out several stories about how this happened by evolutionary means, but the most compelling is the simplest one, and it involves the nature of play. Many creatures play and dream. Mammals, in fact, are great players and dreamers. Playful is almost a characteristic of mammals. Why is this? The real world is dangerous. Not everything that can be tried out, is a good idea to try out in real time with limbs on the line. Also, the real world moves quickly, which means that it can take time to learn the lessons of a particular encounter. Playing and dreaming fit together. A dream puts the world in some kind of order, and play goes through it without so much risk.

This means that the value of Second Life, as a dream and play scape, is not in solving some specific problem, but in the nature as a dream and play space to work through problems that are too dangerous to be allowed to run in the real world in real time. As if designed, second life has managed in a few years to prove the necessity of banking laws and escrow accounts....

But what I'm focusing on here is the wholesale disconnection-from-reality of a society that's already well along that path. Believe me, this is not a future prediction that I'm particularly fond of. But nonetheless, I can't deny its high likelihood of coming to pass. Shades of Huxley's soma...

Yes, the 'real world" that place where people are burning more fossil fuels than we can dig up, and putting more carbon into the air than can be soaked up by the bio-system, and fighting a war over Weapons of Mass Destruction which were a figment of some White House PR flack's imagination. Ummm that real world? I'm going to argue that quit the contrary, that people who are seeking happiness in virtuality, rather than in driving to McDonald's to eat a grease bomb that will increase their chances of a real heat attack that will take up real people's time and real medical technology... You get where I am going with this.

Happiness is always virtual. If we are going to survive this period of time we are going to need to learn how to be happy using much less in the way of resources, and creating much less of an impact. If that means crating projects, this is no different than writing novels, or painting deities on ceilings, or writing tragedies to be performed at religious festivals. There's no such thing as "the real world," because we aren't given the omniscient perception that would enable us to experience it an sich in an unmediated manner.

So this prediction of doom, as people go to virtual worlds rings as false to me as hand wringing over Wikipedia not being written by a small gorup of people who get paychecks. The Great Encyclopedia Britannica lent itself to A fraud by a man who ought to have known better. But it is to Charles Van Doren that the last line belongs to:

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well. I remember better, because, despite the abrupt caesura in my academic career that occurred in 1959, I have gone on teaching the humanities almost continually to students of all kinds and ages. In case you don't remember, then, I remind you that according to Aristotle happiness is not a feeling or sensation but instead is the quality of a whole life. The emphasis is on "whole," a life from beginning to end. Especially the end. The last part, the part you're now approaching, was for Aristotle the most important for happiness. It makes sense, doesn't it?

The question is life taken as a whole. People have retreated into chess, alcohol, religion, sex. But out of these retreats have come many great works of art and ideas, which are later able to order the world. We are here, not because out there will someday be here, but as much because here will one day be out there.

To The General

It was, I think you know, a leaden age,
with words slopped daily on the page,
and glopped out from the screaming screen
upon which talking heads could pimp and preen.

It was, I think you've written many times,
an age berift of those inner lights
that fashions poetry and soaring rhymes
and teaches children of their rights.

It was, I think I've heard you say,
the kind of age that set's it's yes,
on those who steal and make others pay,
on those who copy words and plagurize.

It was an age that's falling fast,
and it's your laugh that's heard at last.

For the General, best regards, Lillie.