Omega Point

I noticed this morning on the Alt-Zoom Studios site that September’s Take5 shorts have been posted. September’s theme was “Unhealthy“. Yay, machinima!

It’s true, the LSL Wiki has returned, now hosted at LSLwiki.com. This is the complete database as it existed on SecondLife.com as of the moment it was taken down. Your logins are all the same. There’s still a couple redirect problems I haven’t cleaned out yet, but it works. I’ll finish fixing that stuff tomorrow. In the meantime, happy LSLing.

Edit: There will be changes and upgrades to the wiki in the near future. Some of this may include porting the database to a more modern wiki engine. I’m certainly not making this decision alone, but I haven’t decided what I want to do yet.

While frequently used to great effect in prose, text is a notoriously poor medium for conveying the emotional metadata humans rely on for face-to-face conversation. How do we know exactly how to interpret someone else’s words, stripped of their emotional context? What was intended as a simple request for information may be taken by one reader as a joke, while another may see it as a personal attack.

The system used by many modern internet users was proposed in the early 1980s by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist with Carnegie Mellon University. He suggested that users employ a short series of characters, evoking the iconic smiley face, to demonstrate that their words were to be taken lightheartedly: :-)

While at the time, the proposal was viewed by many as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the smiley quickly caught on, and is as recognizable as the letters “www” today, demonstrating its effectiveness in clarifying human-to-human interaction in text-based communication. In the decades since, internet users have extended the original system by adopting many other emoticons, conveying displeasure, sadness, disgust, exhaustion, and many others, inserting much-needed emotional context to their chat and email conversations.

Just as virtual environments like Second Life are frequently described as updated MUDs or chatrooms, user interactions within them can be similarly enhanced by the use of body language and gestures based on that of real-world humans. Consider the image of an avatar facing another and smiling, looking away disinterestedly, or standing with arms crossed; each conveys a radically different message even when associated with the same text.

But what about cases in which we see avatars’ body language injected into our communications without our explicit permission? There have been countless posts to the Second Life forums by newer users, angry and hurt by the disdainful, superior manner of an established resident, and how they were deliberately ignored.

These new users describe an incident that usually follows a set pattern. They approached a Linden employee or an older resident, usually a fairly high-profile content creator, and greeted them. The established resident turned to face them, looked down their nose, and turned back to what they were doing. In actual fact, this is a client-side avatar animation – when chat is “heard” on the client, avatars appear to turn their heads to face it without any input from the user controlling that avatar.

From the perspective of the Linden or longtime resident, they are unlikely to have even known anyone approached them, as they were busy doing something else: programming, browsing the web, or working on textures, leaving behind a puppet with its strings cut.

This is an example of a “subconscious” message injected to the communications channel. While no information has deliberately been conveyed, to a human observer, a clear message has been sent. The body language of the avatar has effectively spoken for its user. Yet, to the recipient of this message, the avatar is the human. From their perspective, they’ve just been snubbed by some standoffish person who clearly can’t be bothered to even give them the time of day.

Next: Deliberate subconscious filters and their implications.

Hamlet needs to not talk to reporters about me while drunk. Seriously.

Update 16/09/06:
It seems some people have gotten the wrong idea here. Allow me to explain:

• Yes, I was homeless. However, what Hamlet is talking about in that video happened in February of 2003. In fact, his original story about it even notes that I hadn’t been homeless for some months as of its writing.
• I did not build a laptop; I had one with me. Hamlet is drunk and mixing up his words. Besides, have you ever looked inside a laptop? Not gonna happen.
• I did build much of the computer I actually used to connect to SL from parts I scrounged up, both before and after I became homeless.
• “Hacking” into wireless networks is more a matter of antenna strength than software. The software is a matter of point-and-click.
• Picking power supplies out of a dumpster is not a feat of unparalleled hacker skill.
• I have been living well out of slum conditions for over three years now.
• Had I been homeless for the past four years, there is almost no way I could have continued to enter Second Life during this time. Computers break. Computers are stolen. Computers are sold for crack.*
• I attended SL Views at Linden Lab earlier this year, without anyone suggesting I might be homeless.
• There are numerous photos of me circulating around the internet, with clean clothes and skin, my hair cut and styled, in an apartment I claim to be mine.
• Homeless people tend to be homeless for a reason. People homeless for more than a couple weeks tend to be homeless for a very good reason, that frequently precludes their ever escaping poverty. Society sucks.

* I am not on crack. I was not on crack. After four years on the streets? The odds are pretty good I would be.

Due to the recent security issues affecting Second Life, the LSL Wiki will no longer be hosted on the Second Life website I’ll post additional updates here next week when it relocates to its new home at LSLwiki.com.

In the meantime, a few users have a backup available here.