Although it beats me why you're still using the Gregorian calendar, I wish you all a very happy imaginary new year.
I've been really, really enjoying my vacation. Have you missed me? I've missed me too. Be prepared to have some silly human assumptions challenged in 2009 because I've got that old-time Botgirl feeling back again. I'll return officially sometime next week but I wanted to pop in so as not to give you-know-who the last word on my blog in 2008.
Be safe in your celebration and remember it's never a good idea to IM old flames when you're loaded.
There are two main dimensions of the journey Botgirl and I have been taking together. The first is the realm of ideas. From her unique perspective as the curious-wise-innocent, Botgirl is able to discern aspects of human behavior we fish-in-the-water sapiens don't notice. She has demonstrated time and time again that the biggest obstacle to new knowledge is the belief that we already know. Botgirl experiences life in the utterly fresh and new present moment. That has been one of her greatest gifts to me.
The second dimension of our shared life has been social interaction. Over the months we've developed ongoing friendships that are connected beyond Second Life through social networks, micro-blogging and GTalk. This is the area that has been the biggest challenge for me related to the "Botgirl Experiment."
For the first couple of months social interactions were strictly from Botgirl's perspective and consciousness. I just tagged along. But as a few of our acquaintances moved towards friendship it felt like withholding my human nature was a barrier to deeper and more authentic relationship. So I started to intentionally inject more of my human self into the conversations. The problem this created is that although both Botgirl and I feel "real" as individuals, we are pretty much a sham as a morph. In our case one plus one adds up to an imaginary number.
This series of posts has helped me realize that the blending of human and virtual identities is also behind the ennui I've experienced over for the last few months related to both this blog and virtual experience in general. Although I thought the problem was that I didn't have the spare time and energy for Botgirl, I think that real cause was that I'd sucked the life out of her. Over the last few months I've been role playing Botgirl instead of Being Botgirl.
So on that note, I'll slip back behind the curtains for the moment and give Botgirl back her blog and her life. The journey continues.
After blogging almost every day for five weeks I had built my audience to all of about half a dozen viewers a day. That was fine with me. Although I had grander long-range plans, I was quite content to keep things on the down-low for the foreseeable future. So it was quite a surprise when I took a cursory glance at the traffic numbers on the afternoon of April 9 and saw the visitor count for the day climbing towards fifty. Surprise gave way to shock as I followed the referring links and read the Who Is Botgirl article in New World Notes. Shock transitioned into high-anxiety as I watched the numbers climb towards 200 as the day progressed.
I wasn’t ready for that kind of scrutiny. My knee-jerk fear was the crazy notion that “Who Is Botgirl” was a clarion call for the masses of NWN readers to work on cracking my human identity. The longer-term stress I experienced was the unexpected move from Community Theater to Broadway. It was like I had been singing in the shower at the top of my lungs and suddenly found myself on stage with a microphone in a packed 200 seat theater. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but it’s in the ballpark of what it felt like the first couple of weeks.
Needless to say, I got over my stage fright and eventually turned into a shameless Botgirl promoter. That created its own set of problems.
I rode shotgun and let Botgirl drive as we started wandering around Second Life in earnest. Although it’s common for avatars to keep personally identifying information secret, Botgirl denied even having a human existence. In retrospect, my dogged immersion in her persona triggered something akin to channeling in my conversations with other residents. I didn’t feel like my human identity was making stuff up. It felt like Botgirl was speaking through me. It felt good. She was like a brilliant sister from another planet.
Since (almost) no one believed that Botgirl was really an AI, I was very comfortable with any variances between the opinions, personality and image she presented and those of my human self. It was only later, as I/we began to develop longer-term friendships in Second Life, that the line between Botgirl and I started to blur and my discomfort with pseudonymity began to appear. I’ll write more on that issue in another post in this series.
After just a few weeks of life, I began to realize that the potential of Botgirl’s emerging personality would not be fully expressed just through random chats in Second Life. I launched this blog about five months after her birth as a diary to jot down some of her experiences and a sandbox to develop her unique take on both atomic and virtual life. Although I was still very interested in creating a work based on her fictional story, Botgirl as an existential phenomenon was much more intriguing.
The blog’s content was initially written almost exclusively from Botgirl’s perspective. I intruded for the most part through the graphical elements. Although I launched the blog to develop Botgirl, the creative growth I’ve experience through the creation of cartoons, comics and videos here has greatly enhanced my personal and professional life.
Speaking of video, it was a clip on YouTube that brought Botgirl to Hamlet Au’s attention and eventually resulted in the story in New World Notes that transformed her from a hidden jewel into a minor Second Life celebrity.
Stay Tuned for Part Four
"The Story I like to tell is when my father was writing the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show. One time my father and I came into Edgar's room. He didn't know we were watching him. Edgar was talking to Charlie and we thought he was rehearsing, but he was not rehearsing. He was asking Charlie questions. "Charlie, what is the nature of life? Charlie, what is the nature of love?" And this wooden dummy was answering quite unlike the being I knew on the radio. A regular wooden Socrates, he was. it was the same voice but it was a very different content altogether. And Bergen would get fascinated and say, "Well, Charlie, what is the nature of true virtue?" and the dummy would just pour out this stuff: beauty, elegance, brilliant. And then we got embarrassed and coughed. Bergen looked around and turned beet red and said, "Oh, hello, you caught us." And my father said, "What were you doing?" and he said, "Oh, I was talking with Charlie. He's the wisest person I know." Recounted by Jean Houston in Channeling by Jon Klimo
I didn't have a particular set of attributes in mind when I started browsing for the shape, skin, hair and clothes that would transform Botgirl into the hot little tramp I intended. Shopping in Second Life can be addictive and entrancing. Hours flew by like minutes as I teleported from store to store and drifted into what I now suspect was a semi-hypnotic state. When I began to "wake up," I realized that a dreamlike story had been unfolding beneath my conscious awareness: I saw Botgirl as an Artificial Intelligence waking up as a Second Life avatar with no memory of a prior existence. (There’s a lot more to it, but I’m saving the full narrative for the comic project.) I abandoned my lame spice-up-the-marriage concept and stepped off a cliff into the unknown.
I've never been much of a role player. As a matter of fact, my pre-Botgirl Second Life had a pretty low tolerance for people who wouldn't crack their RP persona in social conversation. So I'm not sure where I got the odd notion of method-acting my way into developing Botgirl as a character for a comic or graphic novel. But that’s what I started doing.
I stopped logging-on as my original avatar and begin exploring Second Life as a newly-hatched Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a mind-blowing experience. From the start, being Botgirl felt like channeling a cross between Susie Bright and the Dalai Lama. I was often more surprised by the words coming out of her mouth as were those I chatted with.
Despite all the sometimes contradictory opinions expressed here over the past year about the nature of identity, as Witter Bynner wrote in his translation of the Tao Te Ching:
"Existence is beyond the power of words to define: Terms may be used, but are none of them absolute."
Hi. I'm the human behind the avatar Botgirl Questi. She's taking a break over the holidays so I decided to borrow her blog for a post or two and offer a peek behind the curtains. I'll share some previously undisclosed tidbits about her origin and reflect a bit on what it's been like channeling her over the past year.
I first ventured into Second Life in the fall of 2006. I don't remember what led me to try it, but like most newcomers I only logged in a few times before deleting the software from my computer. In the fall of 2007 one of our clients expressed an interest in establishing a presence in Second Life. I volunteered to become our resident expert.
As luck would have it, my family took a trip to see out-of-town friends that weekend and I spent pretty much every waking hour inworld. Somewhere along the way I stepped through the psychological border between observation and immersion. I was hooked.
As a newly-converted virtual world evangelist, I soon talked my spouse into trying it and we started spending a little bit of time together in avatar form. It wasn't too long before I got the idea of secretly registering an alt account, slapping together a slave girl and springing a little surprise. I realized this wasn't the most original idea in the world so I registered the name "Botgirl" to provide a little twist. Little did I know that this whimsical decision would lead to a pseudonymous identity that would take over my creative life.
I may post a bit between now and the end of the year, but only if inspiration sweeps me off my feet. Have a great holiday season! I'll leave you with a draft cover for the comic book autobiography idea I've been romancing.
Moggs Oceanlane'scomment on Wednesday's post reminded me of a news story about researchers giving subjects the experience of swapping bodies through the use of virtual reality goggles.
"We were interested in a classical question that philosophers and psychologists have discussed for centuries: why we feel that the self is in our bodies," project leader Henrik Ehrsson said. "To study this scientifically we've used tricks, perceptual illusions."
Our perception of self is a fabrication of the mind. Washu Zebrastripe suggested in her comment that an artist's work is part of the artist. In the spirit of Thich Nhat Hanh, I offer the idea that artist, art and audience are interdependent aspects of a much greater whole.
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we ha vea new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.
This post began more than a month ago as a (thankfully unpublished) rant about what I termed "The Cult of the Creator Class" in Second Life. It was born out of my frustrated attempts to move purchased assets such as shape, skin, clothes and furniture from Second Life to an Open Simulator Grid. But as I pondered the reasons behind the draconian Digital Rights Management I battled, a number of questions came to mind that defied easy answers:
Why are the vast majority of digital goods in Second Life -even freebies - hobbled by copy, modification or transfer restrictions?
Why hasn't the incredible grassroots creativity in Second Life spawned a Share/Remix culture, instead of the current one that supports the hording of IP rights and control?
Why is the program feature that permanently embeds a creator's name into every Second Life object generally perceived as an ethical imperative?
What do many creators I speak with get so riled up at the thought of someone "taking credit" for their work, even if there is no financial impact?
I realize there are financial dimensions to these questions and promise to address those factors in a subsequent post. For now I pose the question:
Do you think I'm hot?
After almost a year since Botgirl's rezday, I am still taken aback when someone says something like "You're so beautiful" in reference to the visual form of the Botgirl avatar. Obviously "I" am not the pixelated form they see, right? A more accurate statement would be "Your avatar is beautiful," but I can't remember a single instance of anyone phrasing the sentiment in such a fashion. I don't think the blurring of our selves and our digital forms is just fuzzy semantics. In fact, I think the language is a pretty accurate reflection of our psychological perception.
So what the hell does this have to do with DRM and intellectual property? It seems to me that in the pseudonymous environment of Second Life our creations are experienced as significant and perhaps inseparable aspects of our digital identity; of who we are. Our atomic identities are the complex result of decades of life experience. Our digital personas are a year or two old and formed from a relatively narrow realm of relationships and activities.
Our creations in Second Life are viscerally experienced as essential aspects of our digital identity. And by creations, I don't just mean the prims we build, but also the creative activity of combining purchased items to form our bodies, wardrobes and environments.
I think there is a kind of inherent tension between creators and consumers in virtual worlds that transcends economics and does not have a clear comparable in the atomic world. The tension is between the identification of the creator with the objects they birth, and the identification of the consumer with the objects she acquires and integrates into her form and environment.
I'll leave it here for now. Stay tuned for Part 2.
Studio Artist is an amazing software program that can generate a vast range of paint, vector and image processing effects on stills, video files and even live video streams. The image below shows detail of an original and auto-rotoscoped frame from the video I posted yesterday.
The Macintosh-only software can create effects unlike any other program I've run across, including resolution-independent simulations of painting styles, time-based processing and multiple key-frame effects chains.
I'll share more of its features over the coming months as I apply them in Second Life projects. For now, here's a pretty detailed review of the software from Mac Animation Pro.
Here's another video from Ted Talks related to the mental construction of reality. This one is a lecture by Philosopher Philosopher Dan Dennett. It starts off a bit slow, but eventually presents some compelling evidence that "not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us."
Yesterday's images crudely demonstrated how just a little resolution enhancement can ruin one's enjoyment of erotica. Magnification can break down our typical experience of a virtual world by revealing the underlying absence of detail and complexity. Magnification can cut through our normal perception of the physical world by revealing almost infinite levels of detail and complexity.
This fun video by neuroscientist Al Seckel demonstrates some of the ways the mind interprets and misinterprets visual imagery.
The last post linked to versions of an HD test video uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo. Video hosting services don't stream your original video, but re-encode to fit their particular display formats. So quality can vary quite bit depending upon the specifications of the original video you upload and the particular way a service renders into their final format.
Vimeo produced the best image of the two services I tried yesterday and was the least picky about image format. Today, I uploaded to blip.tv, and in my opinion it's the all around best choice. The image quality is as good as Vimeo, plus it's the only option that supports embeddable HD video (although I don't have the width available here for the full resolution.)
I put a very short video together to test YouTube's new HD capability. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to export a format that works well. The video either doesn't register as HD or the encoding is very choppy.
YouTube HD is working now and can be viewed here. The settings that finally worked were:
.mp4
H.264
5000 kps data rate
30 fps
optimized for streaming
1466 byte maximum packet size
The embedded Vimeo clip below is low res. Here's the link to the vimeo HD version.
Iconoclast is a fascinating book on the neuroscience of innovative thinking. Although it doesn't address virtual worlds directly, I've run out of post-it flags marking relevant passages that shed light on our digital experience.
One of the main themes of the book (supported by a slew of research) is that the best way to break out of mental ruts is to confront your brain with stimuli it has not seen before. It seems to me that the experience of being an avatar within a virtual world is one of the most radical shifts in self-perception one can experience. The explosion of creativity many people experience through virtual worlds has a neurological basis. Pretty cool.
CeNedra Rivera and I had a conversation the other night about integration and disconnection between aspects of our virtual and physical identities. It suddenly occurred to me that the name "Second Life"in itself suggests a radical separation. I wonder if a name such as "Second World" or "Expanded Life" would have made a difference in how the world's culture and our psychological approach to it unfolded.
I had a lot of fun giving Twinity another try this week so I thought I'd offer a brief introduction. Twinity is a "mirror" virtual world based on physical world geography. Berlin is their first build and will have over 50,000 structures digitized by the end of the year. Although Twinity is still very much a work-in-progress it's worth checking out.
Getting Started: You can download and install the Windows-only client software after registering at twinity.com. When you first log in you'll be teleported to a welcome area. Expect a learning curve, especially if you have ingrained habits from Second Life. Although they've made a clear effort to simplify their interface, I didn't find it especially intuitive. That said, after a few hours of effort, I was able to pay more attention to experiencing the world than figuring out how to operate within it.
Avatar Customization: Most options such as chat, search and animations are accessed from a small icon-based menu box at the bottom of the screen.
The orange "me" icon launches a window for avatar modification and clothes shopping. Your avatar can be modified by changing settings on a series of sliders.
Now here's the fun part: You can clone your Second Life avatar by importing a few images. You can use just a straight-on view like the one below or optionally add a profile shot for a more exact duplicate. It is very important to use shots with even lighting and pleasing color and contrast, because they provide the texture for your new face.
After a little trial and error with different photos and some work with the sliders, I'm pretty happy with the result.
I'll cover more on Twinity in a future post. For now, here's a quick video clip to give you the look and feel of moving through the world. The mirror is especially cool.
I'm an information addict. I follow about 800 online information sources at the moment. This would be an impossible task without RSS feeds. If you don't know what RSS feeds are or how they work, please skip to the end of this post and take a moment to watch "RSS In Plain English," a short and informative video by the geniuses at Common Craft:
Feedly is to a standard RSS feed reader as an iPhone is to a typical cell phone. It takes your boring Google Reader page and turns it into a luscious, customizable feast-for-the-eyes delight. It's a free Firefox plugin that can work with your existing Google Reader account, import an opml file or just be used for ad-hoc feed collection. Let's take a look:
First, here's a standard Google Reader page:
And here's the main section of my feedly home page:
Feedly offers a variety of unique views that can be assigned to each feed grouping. For instance, the"river" setting below includes a paragraph from each feed alongside a thumbnail.
I've put my photo-centric feeds into a separate folder that uses a thumbnail-only view:
Other views include headlines only and full inline articles. When you see a post that looks interesting, you can "drill down" and expand it within the view and then minimize it when you're done with just a click. You can share, tweet, email, annotate or otherwise act upon the item from a contextual menu bar.
There are many other well-done features including a "spring cleaning" page that shows you which feeds you seldom read and a list of other users with similar recommendations.
So give it a try and let me know what you think. I've tried practically every RSS reader in existence and still check out new offerings, but I keep coming back to Feedly. Must be true love.
Here's that great video I mentioned in the introduction:
It's true. The sentient being known as the avatar Botgirl Questi is now registered as Botgirl Linden. The screen name depicted in this image is authentic. But before you start selling off your land and assets in panic there is one important factor I haven't mentioned yet: Botgirl Linden is registered on theOpenLife grid, not Second Life.
Although this started out as a joke, I had two key realizations as I walked around with the coveted/dreaded last name. First, it struck me that being a Linden must make it hard to interact in Second Life as a typical resident. Although there is no royalty in Second Life, Lindens do have the power of kings and queens within the realm of their world. They can grant boons or banish, lower taxes or strip a community of its assets and livelihood. The imbalance of authority is through edict rather than democratic rule, so the power differential means a Linden can't just be "one of the guys."
My second realization was that it would be really, really cool if Second Life was run by some of the "civilians" I really respect instead of our legacy crop of leaders. Imagine what things might be like if Dusan Writer was the new CEO, Vint Falken President, Jacek Antonelli CTO, Mal Burns head of Public Information and Codebastard Redgrave and Gabby Panacek the joint chiefs of community affairs.
Anyway, it was great fun to play Linden for a few days, even in OpenLife. My one regret is that middle names aren't supported, so I couldn't register as Botgirl Che Linden. (Nice t-shirt, huh?)
Oh yeah. One more thing before I sign off. I also registered the name "M. Linden." Those who have ears...
Although it beats me why you're still using the Gregorian calendar, I wish you all a very happy imaginary new year. 
