Well, so will you look at that - I lied! After talking four days in a row now about this alternative-reality videogame I'm completely obsessed with these days, called Second Life (here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4, for those who need to get caught up), I swore yesterday that I wouldn't write about SL again, because I'm sure there are lots of readers who could care less about it all, and are starting to get pissed that I'm talking so much about it. Oh, but then two things happened: 1) I realized that I still had a lot more to actually say; and 2) some of my readers shot back with emails saying that, no, in fact, it's all surprisingly fascinating, and that they wished I actually would write more about it. Okay, so combine the two, and that's what's led me to decide to write yet another entry about it all today. And I'm sorry if you don't like reading about this stuff! I'm sure the obsession will be going away sometime soon, but it just doesn't seem to have done so yet.

Okay, so first an update to the reader fundraiser for a new Mini I announced here yesterday; $50 raised in the first 24 hours! Only $450 to go! Yeehaw! So thanks to Phil Young in the UK, Wade Pottinger in LA, and Caro Morgan in South Africa for the donations so far. (Ah, a global audience supporting my forays into a virtual world...do I get to call myself Web 2.0 now?) For those who missed it, basically my big problem right now is that my older, slower G4 at home won't actually load the videogame software properly, which means I just have to bite the bullet and get a new computer if I want to play at all. (It's a processor issue, in other words, not a memory one.) And these new Intel Minis are only $500 for the lowest-end model, but will do the trick nicely, and will plug up to the monitor and keyboard I already own. But I'm unemployed, so can't just buy the fucking thing myself, so I'm seeing if maybe my readers would all think about chipping in five bucks, twenty bucks, whatever, and help me buy one instead. And in return, I won't fundraise this summer for the South Africa trip I'll be taking in August, but instead earn the money through in-game activities and my screaming-fast new Mini; and that way I can then publish the travel book about the trip afterwards completely for free (just like 'dat Cory Doctorow!), instead of as a reward just to the people who donated money for the trip. And that would be great - to be able to release the fancy-schmancy full-color interactive PDF version completely for free.

That trip is going to cost $4,000; so if I can get this Mini right away, and start playing and making money, that'll save you an entire summer of annoying fundraising notices like this from me, as I try to raise that $4,000. So, willing to help put in a $500 investment to save all of us from this much larger fundraiser, coming this summer? Want to hear me talk a lot more about Second Life, social and group dynamics in a virtual world, and the like, all moved in this case to a brand-new blog, maintained as my SL character? Yeah, of course you do! That's why you should click on my Paypal link below:

Remember, $500 is the minimum I need; $572 would be a much better figure, actually, because that would get me a full year of Premium membership in advance. And that gets me my own permanent land in SL among other things, which means I could actually build a small, beginner version of my club, and immediately be able to start organizing events and making money, even within the first couple of weeks of being a player. And it's brilliant, really, how SL controls zoning within their virtual world; because they tie it directly to how much server and bandwidth usage your structure would create, and whether you can afford that or not, instead of any artificial zoning laws (which would be pointless in a virtual world, since you don't have to worry about things like pollution and congestion there). Explanation below...

What you get with a Premium membership (which is $10 a month, or $72 for a year if you pay all at once) is just a small parcel of land within SL, almost like homesteading; 512 square meters, to do whatever you want with. But see, how objects are actually built within SL is through the combining of "prims," or primary objects that Linden Labs has already created for you - flat panels, cones, spheres, pyramids, etc. To have the most basic house in existence, for example, nothing more than a shanty, would require six prims - five panels to serve as walls and a floor, and a pyramid for the roof. (You can then give these prims whatever texture you want; that's how you make things fancy within the game, like shag carpeting for example.) So you get these 512 square meters of land for free with your Premium account, and can do whatever the hell you want on it, but you can only have a maximum amount of prims on the space, and a maximum amount of other characters at once. And so this means, for example, that you can't build a complicated skyscraper, casino, etc, on that small space, because it would require way too many prims to design such a complex erection.

So just like in real life, of course, you can always start small within SL and build your way up, taking on additional land (and additional prim usage), in return for paying an additional monthly fee to Linden Labs, for the extra load on their servers the new land causes. And you can build larger and larger structures, more and more complicated ones, host more and more people at the same time. So Linden doesn't have to artificially tell people at all what they can and cannot build on their land; the usage limits alone naturally determines the boundaries. Nice! And then the other extremely cool thing about this being in a virtual world, of course, is that it doesn't have to be the same structure all the time either; I can always change rooms around with the click of a mouse, add new rooms or demolish old ones, even replace the entire building itself in seconds, with the click of one mouse button. (Then I just keep the dormant other buildings in my infinitely large handbag, where I also store my clothing, emails from other players, an annotated map of SL, etc. Yes, you can keep entire houses in your handbag! Many of them, in fact! It takes a little getting used to, admittedly.)

So you see where I'm going with this, right? I can still build a small club on my space, one not much larger than a private house, and go ahead and start hosting events for 10, 15 people. That'd be just fine at first, actually, in that I probably couldn't convince more people than this to attend my first events anyway. Then later in the night I can shut down the arts club, replace it with a small version of my sex-club building, and host 10- to 15-person adult get-togethers as well. And that's especially perfect, because the whole way I'm going to build a customer base for the sex stuff is almost exclusively through word-of-mouth alone; to attend sex events myself, visit RL blogs and forums, personally invite the people who I think will be into this stuff to my events. So that's my only real goal in the first few months anyway with the sex club, is to just throw successful events that will make people realize that I'm serious about this stuff, and that I can do what I'm promising (hook up cool, interesting, kinky people within SL, that is, who are all looking for cybersex with other members).

So anyway, even more cool news concerning all this; I've now actually corresponded with three different employees at Linden Labs now, the Silicon Valley startup who owns and maintains Second Life. Wow, are there some amazingly cool and smart people working at Linden; makes me more and more wish that they'd offer me a job as an evangelizer there, because this might possibly be the first company staff in my corporate career that I could actually get along with. I've been getting lots and lots of advice, tech specs and positive feedback from the Linden people about all my plans, which is a gratifying and fascinating experience. And so cool, by the way, that no one at Linden has any moral qualms about what I want to do within SL to make money; as far as I can tell, they really couldn't give much of a shit about what their entrepreneurs are actually doing, as long as it doesn't break the six-item code of behavior governing the entire world ("No violence," "No outing someone's real-life identity against their will," etc).

Now, they are concerned with keeping it out of the PG-designated areas of SL; this is how they enforce morality instead, which is a much smarter way, is to let individual users voluntarily block certain content or behavior, by hanging out exclusively in PG-rated regions of the world. And like I said, I think this is a great idea, instead of simply banning certain options from everyone, so I am more than happy to comply with this. So they and I have also been talking about where in the future I'll be able to advertise, where in the forums I'll be able to post, etc., and I'm actively working with them to make sure we all have a clear understanding about it all. I have a lot of money at stake, and they have a bunch of much happier customers at stake, so believe me, we're all interested in working together to see how such a thing can be successfully implemented.

So yeah, only $450 (er, $522 even better) until this all becomes a reality. Wanna help out? Please help this unemployed pajama-clad loser become an employed pajama-clad loser! And then I'll get to go to those fucking Bay-area tech conferences too, and wear my leather suit jacket and funny-looking glasses, and get drunk with all the cool kids, and make fun of them here in my journal for you to read along and snicker at! Your assistance is appreciated!

(Oh, fuck, and I almost forgot to tell you, but I actually posted a text-based walkthrough of the sex club yesterday as well, originally written as a chat conversation with my friend K. It explains in insane detail how I'll be taking advantage of virtual-world technology to aid the hookup process: for example, by having holographic devil horns that people can wear when they're looking for cybersex, that glow up like neon, set to blue if you're looking for men, yellow for women, both for bi, blinking if you're looking for group chat, with a little holographic fist floating above them if you're a dom, a rose if you're a sub. That way you'll actually have an ad for what kind of cybersex you're looking for, floating above your head the whole time you're in the club, and will be able to see everyone else's as well; and then if they're not wearing horns, you're not allow to solicit sex from them, and will get kicked out of the club for doing so repeatedly. Anyway, it's long and detailed like that; go read it if you're interested, or not if you're not.)

Okay, so now a little about Second Life for all you academes and other older audience members...

There is actually a very serious side to SL as well, which is an entire development network of educators, as well as a substantial discount on price for any non-profits who get involved, just like with Apple. This is Pathfinder's speciality, in fact, the first Linden employee I made contact with, and who so far I've spoken with the most. And he's been really urging me to somehow marry my arts center, CCLaP, with the arts club I want to run within SL, so as to get a price break on our Shoutcast costs and other associated bills. But that's problematic, see, because technically CCLaP is not a non-profit; we're a for-profit venture, in fact, and will eventually be registering as a commercial company within the state of Illinois (later this summer, but before we officially open for business). So that might raise some tricky issues within SL, especially among legitimate NFPs, if they were to give CCLaP an educational discount. That's the whole reason I'm not incorporating as a non-profit, after all, is to avoid messy situations like that, where suddenly outside organizations have the right to tell me what I can and cannot do.

What I would much rather do is simply create a brand-new non-profit, years down the road when I'm ready, specifically for organizing and running the cool-ass ARG social experiment I do want to try within SL. And what's that experiment? Why, a utopian society, of course! One of the things you can buy there, in fact, is your own private island, broken off from the mainland proper, for doing whatever you want with it, able to host something like 50 avatars at the same time. And under the educational discount for such a thing, a non-profit would end up spending about $1,000 as a one-time fee (for actually buying the land), and then about $100 a month in "land usage" fees (or the extra server and bandwidth load that amount of land is now costing them - it's very regulated, actually, with a flat rate assigned per square meter of land, which is a pretty cool way to do it in my opinion).

So, create a virtual-reality version of the Well, the fabled noble online community experiment in the '80s (which I was briefly a part of, by the way, as a teen, only for a month or so, until mom and dad got the phone bill back from all those long-distance calls from Missouri to California, and then suddenly I was no longer a part of the Well, sigh). That is, all who live and socialize there are committed to a certain code of behavior - to always express opinions in constructive instead of demeaning ways, for example. An entire experiment in group positive behavior; if you create a situation where people are voluntarily acting positive and constructive all the time, what could that bring to all the individuals who choose to participate?

You resell small plots of land on the island to individual utopia members, for them to build their own house and yard, while helping to financially support the non-profit (with this money, of course, being tax-deductible as well). Then build bungalows as well, and give them away for free to artists like...er, fucking me, for example, who can only afford the free basic account right now, but who would love a little donated bungalow on a utopian island like this, just a tiny place to call home. Build a community focal point, a fantastical one, where creative concerts are held all the time, day and night, sponsored by the nonprofit running the island. Intellectual talks, speakers, professors, discussion clubs; the ideas are endless. And then even cooler, have a large "playground" on the island as well - a giant grassy field, where specific objects can be set up temporarily and then removed later, so that individual teachers and classes in the real world can actually try one-week, two-week SL experiments - recreating a historical battle, living together as a camp. Again, the possibilities are endless. And offer this to free to any educational facility who wants to do it - this would be part of the mission of the nonprofit. And of course you can sign up for free accounts as well, which means that it wouldn't cost the educational facility any extra money.

Yeah, you're probably seeing what I'm getting at - that SL is far from a mere gamer's heaven or sex stew, but also a place for serious academic experiments into sociology, group behavior and the like. It's a chance to put some of Skinner's principles to work, for example, without having to necessarily take on the outrageous human-rights violations that can sometimes come from his experiments gone awry. It's an infinitely complex world, with an infinitely complex amount of things to do there; maybe more and more of you are starting to understand this now, and are forgiving me a little more now for going on for five days in a row about this.

Okay - that's it for today, I think. I swear, I swear, I will hopefully be getting off this subject soon. Just as soon as I run out of things to say about it, that is.