I Love The Smell Of Bugs In The Morning

Imagine my surprise when I looked at my blog this afternoon and there were weird people looking back at me from my profile picture. How the heck did that happen? Did someone hack Blogger? Or did their database references just become corrupt or something.

I looked at the guys more up close and they aren't even that attractive. Darn.


Then I noticed someone hiding under the title bar. What's wrong with my site? Why is someone with a stethoscope and lab coat sitting under my title bar?

That isn't even one of my kinks. So, annoyed to have to deal with this, I went to the profile editing, uploaded my profile picture. *Again*. And now the two weird guys in the mirror aren't staring out at me and doctors aren't hiding underneath of my title. But now I don't have any profile picture. Re-uploading didn't help.

So, for now that spot will remain blank until I figure out what's up. Maybe Blogger will fix itself, maybe I'll re-upload once a day until it works again. Maybe you won't have my cute face to look at every time you read my blog. Come to think of it, that's a tragedy, no one should be deprived of *me*. I wonder if Blogger has an emergency hotline for bugs that are super important.

The SexBots Are Already Here

Well, it turns out some people have already written sexbots for a profit motive - to steal your personal information.

According to a recent piece in the Guardian, Russian software developers recently unleashed a program called CyberLover, which roams chat rooms posing as flirtatious women, then duping users into giving them personal data—phone numbers, addresses, even sexy photos.

The author of the column on cybersex, remarks about the amazing repetitiveness of of most of it and wonders if most guys would notice or care if it really was a sexbot on the other end of the "conversation".

Still, the idea that a computer program could fool even the most desperate lover in cyber bed makes an online sex enthusiast wonder: is some cybersex so predictable that it could be done by a robot?

I’ll admit: some days I feel like a sexbot myself. Camping out for research in the AOL Big Flirt chat room, where online love is practiced 'Wam-bam-ty-mam!' style, it’s not hard to get cynical. After the third guy in an hour has asked “Do you swallow?” within moments of introducing himself, the repetitiveness of uninspired cybersex makes itself strangely clear. Descriptions of the same-sex acts with the same outcomes (“First I’d lick you, then I’d fuck you, then I’d cum all over your face”) pop up on the screen again and again. A girl can’t help but think: if cyberers are so uncreative, maybe they’d be happier with a machine.

Finally, she does a little research of her own, by using stock responses copied and pasted into a chat room to see if people would notice that she wasn't being "creative".

Still, inspired by my Russian brethren, I decided to head back into the AOL chat rooms and test out the idea myself. Armed with only 30 responses (see below), ranging from the harmless (“Not much. Just horny”) to the hardcore (“I’d love to take your cock deep in my throat”), I stuck it out for ten conversations with ostensibly male counterparts whose screen names alone—HardCock, BigDick4U—were enough to make me consider turning in my human skin and resigning myself to life as a computer. Each of the conversations lasted at least half an hour. Most got pretty down and dirty into the cybersex act—though some guys got excited, orgasmed early, and disappeared half way through. Classy.

Unsurprisingly, I found my lines worked 95% of the time. “Mmm” and “Oh yeah” came in handy often, as did “I’d like that” and “I’m rubbing my pussy.” No one asked me, “Are you sure you’re not a sexbot?” In every conversation though, there was at least one moment when my lines just weren’t enough. One user asked me where in New York City I lived. Another asked me whether I’d ever taken it up the ass and what specifically I liked about it. A third wanted to move the chat to webcam, and I had to explain multiple times why I wanted to stay put—without sounding like a broken record.

Her list of 30 "stock" phrases could keep most of her "partners" busy for up to 30 minutes! One scary thing about her list of phrases is that it really doesn't include much hardcore in it.

When I did escorting, I definitely found myself using some of the same words and imagery again and again. I even found myself copying and pasting certain phrases I said into a file I kept of "good phrases". A particularly good turn of word or a phrase that struck me as particularly sexy would go into the file so I wouldn't forget them. Later, if I was feeling uninspired or at an impasse over what to say during a session, I'd glance through the file for ideas.

I also kept a file on most people I met, and not just clients, so I wouldn't forget who they were or why I knew them. Linden Labs even have a feature for this, the 'notes' tab of a profile - a place to put comments and notes about a person. When glancing down your list of friends, it is nice to be able to look someplace and remember why they are on the list. Those files I made, in the case of clients, also recorded their particular kinks and which phrases seemed to turn them on and which ones didn't.

Lillie comments on a different column by the same author that also speaks about the repetitiveness of cybersex. She hints that a good story is coming. I can't wait.

Do Robots Dream Of Electric SLex?

Bots are becoming more and more popular in Second Life, to boost traffic numbers or even dance with guests.

Yes, dancing with guests and even holding a rudimentary conversation. The complexity of the bots is increasing and they will only become better at responding to others as time goes by.

While others debate the considerations for a parcel's 'traffic numbers' and whether or not this is giving an unfair advantage to certain merchants, I think unrestrained 'bot experimentation in Second Life is incredibly promising.

The Turning Test was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a computer program to fool others into believing that they are interacting with a human instead of a machine. Simple programs like Eliza can fool people for a short period of time, whereas more complex ones can fool people for longer. Eliza is a simple program that simulates a therapist speaking to a patient. It is surprising how a little bit of pattern recognition can mimic simple human interaction.

In the past, the tests have been largely academic. Commercial exploitation of artificial intelligence has mainly been limited to expert systems that are good at their designed task. It has always been a challenge to find a situation where people interact with each other without knowing that the other 'person' may not be human. Robotic technology has yet to make something that significantly resembles a human well enough for them to replace something like an order taker at McDonalds. For example, replacing phone support with a software system runs into the problems of speech recognition and natural language processing. However, online chat began to offer an area for software systems to begin to interact with people in a way that computers can easily understand.

Online chat never really had a commercial driver behind it, until now...

Second Life marries a chat environment with a profit motive. Businesses can now interact with people through a virtual environment completely described in terms that a computer can understand. Natural language processing is now the only barrier to having effective simulation of a person. Businesses will not have to solve the speech recognition and robotic simulation problems as well as the natural language processing ones. More importantly, some of the particulars of Second Life such as traffic numbers are actively driving businesses to consider 'bots an effective business tool.

The 'barrier to entry' has been made very low, you only need a compiler and an Internet connection and you can begin to write your own 'bot, but Second Life added that magical twist, money. Now, people will have an economic incentive to develop better general artificial intelligence rather than expert systems. And this goes far beyond just having dance partners in a club, this can now strike at the very thing that drives most human technical innovation, sex.

Soon the ranks of sex workers may be joined by truely virtual escorts - no human involved. Have it press some XCite! buttons and go, "oh god, yes! you are *so* huge," and you are halfway to doing the 'bread and butter' of escorting in Second Life. Guys are already flocking to Second Life for virtual sex and paying money for coordinated chat and XCite button pressing.

It will start small, with a couple of incidents where it was discovered that an escort was a 'bot. There will be calls for more verifications, bot registration, etc. Linden Labs will wisely say nothing while the crowds of 'regulate everything I dislike' call for more bans and restrictions. Later, a 'big' scandal will unfold where it is revealed that a well known escort uses a 'bot to handle the 'tedious' parts of SLex. Linden Labs will resume having interactive help support in the client, while behind the scenes 'bots will handle the simple stuff and only escalate the issue to a human if it gets to a point it can't handle.

Eventually, the town halls where everyone gathers to complain about the bugs will be run almost entirely by 'bots replying, "We are actively working on that issue at the moment, we saw that it was important to the community, so we have dedicated developers to work on that and resolve it as rapidly as possible." Wisely, the complainers will soon begin sending 'bots to the town halls to repeat the same old, tired mantras. 'Bots will be talking to 'bots.

The men who are insecure now about possible having SLex with a guy pretending to be a woman are really going to have their egos crushed when they learn that 'SexyHooker69 Cummings' whom they've had a crush on and have spent thousands of Lindens on is really a 'bot.

Seriously though, the days of being able to tell if you are talking to a human or a 'bot without significant interaction are coming to an end. My original 'Only In Second Life' post pointed to a dramatic blurring of the lines where human pretended to be robot and the robot pretended to be human. It makes the issue of whether or not the 'bots are artificially inflating traffic numbers seem insignificant when half of the escort business could be replaced by them and few guys would notice.

What Meaningful Thing Have You Done Today?

I love Second Life for a number of reasons, but one of my favorites is that it gives disabled people a place to interact where they are not limited by many of their disabilities. Early last year I wrote that one of my Second Life neighbors was in a wheelchair in Real Life and that I had SL friends who had MS, were deaf, were shut-ins, and had all manner of disabilities. In SL they could fly, dance, chat with people, meet lots of new people, and "go places" that would never happen in RL. It still brings a tear to my eye how wonderfully liberating Second Life can be.


Via Lillie Yifu, again, is a wonderful post all about The Heron Sanctuary, a community for the support and aid of disabled people in Second Life.

The post puts it well:

...people with disabilities want the same things everyone else does: we want companionship and friendship especially with people who understand the limitations placed on us by our disabling conditions; we need to learn more about our own conditions, about health and wellbeing, and about resources available to us to make our lives better; we want a chance to be employed or to do volunteer work since both give back to our community; and we want to have fun.

This was really no surprise, nor was it a surprise that these things were difficult to achieve in the world outside our homes.

Those of us who are disabled are often socially isolated, even physically isolated, within our geographic communities.

So three of us from LoveByrd decided to explore virtual reality as a setting within which to build a supportive community. We began to collect medical research about the benefits of operating in virtual reality that accrue to people with different kinds of disabilities.

We visited the websites of a half dozen different virtual worlds, and chose Second Life as the one to colonize, since it seemed at the time to be the richest cultural environment and the most fully developed.

The coming of voice to Second Life disturbed me because I didn't want my deaf friends to be stigmatized or relegated to 'voiceless ghettos' because they couldn't use the voice client. I'm glad Second Life exists so that my friends can lead fuller, richer lives.

It makes me look at myself and go, "What meaningful thing have you done today?" Thankfully, most of my days I can answer, "I may not have been an advocate, but I had fun with a lot of people and hopefully made their lives better by just allowing it to be 'normal'."

The Secret Of How To Get Paid For The Work You Do

Via Lillie's blog, I read a post by Eshi about her experiences with being cheated by corporations out of the money she was owed. Update: Eshi says she was actually paid, just not given credit for her work.

The story is familiar, at least to me, you work hard producing a labor of love only to have the people who commissioned it not pay you, then treat you like a pariah. It is horrible how she was treated and this problem is not isolated to Second Life, it happens all the time in Real Life as well.

Calling for better regulation from Linden Lab won't really work either. The only solution to this happening is contracts, lawyers, and common sense.

When I worked as a consultant (both as part of a firm and as an independent), there were many people who wanted 'something for free'. They truly didn't seem to think that you were making money to live, eat, and have a life. Somehow, your time was all free.

After being on the losing end of this many times, I ended up becoming very good at negotiating deals and writing contracts out of self-preservation. It's lousy and I hate doing it. I like being Pollyanna where everything just 'works out' and the world is all rosy and full of smiles. In other words, I like being optimistic and naive. Someone would ask for my help, sell me on their vision, we'd agree on the price, and then things would all go wrong after that.

It is heart-breaking to become emotionally invested in making something, producing that 'great work', or bringing a truly great vision to reality only to have the real world of money and broken promises intrude. I've been in tears over projects that failed because the other side were lousy business people with more hope than money.

Part of the 'secret' of getting paid for your work is to negotiate a schedule of payments. You need a deposit and clear intervals of payment or clear deliverables after which incremental payment is expected. You deliver some, they deliver some money; you effectively hold the 'end product' hostage.

This is truly a rotten part of life. I'd become excited about working on some project, do a lot of preliminary thought on it, and become attached to it. Then, the deal would not happen and I'd be crushed. In the end I had to learn that there were tons of good ideas out there and that a new one would be along very soon. Sometimes, I had to take the risk of not eating for a while instead of getting involved in a project that wouldn't make certain I was making enough to live - and more importantly was willing to negotiate appropriate payment at appropriate times.

If someone is not willing to put down a deposit for your work, walk away. If they are not willing to pay you regularly or at specified milestones, walk away. If they are not willing to sign a contract, walk away. If they are not willing to provide you with a letter of reference or a case study when the project is complete, walk away.

I had to learn self-respect and self-worth. I had to learn that I didn't have to jump at every chance that came along, hoping it would work out. I had to learn to 'trust but verify.'

Why can't life be as simple as I once thought? Because some people are jerks and cheats while others are merely clueless optimists with more hope than money.

A Fur Joke Would Be Inappropriate Right Now

After encountering the Golden Compass daemon thingie on multiple blogs, I thought, "Why not see what it gives me? I hope I get something cute." Besides it can go with my "Which Barbie are you?"

Some of the questions had me thinking I was going to get a fly, "You have problems concentrating," some sort of lizard, "You are solitary," or perhaps a howler monkey, "You are an opinionated loud mouth."

Instead, I received an Ermine. Hmmm, a mustilidae, I wouldn't have thought of myself as a carnivorous, weasel-like person with offensive scent glands. But this sort of thing goes with the movie, if they did this with Harry Potter, everyone would have either a toad or a white owl. If they had a biologist do this type of quiz and put in a wide selection of animals, too many people would end up as three-toed sloths, wildebeasts, or something else that would have lots of irate mothers calling in saying, "My daughter is crying because your site called her a warthog! Why couldn't you have used cute things like bunnies?"

The DMCA And Evil Ad Spammers

I don't think I've ever mentioned it before, but I hate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Recently, a number of people have taken to posting pictures on Flickr showing 'Ad Spam' places around Second Life and their owners. Attempting to shame them or inform others about who they are so that no one supports them monetarily.

The example to the left in this post is a mega-prim ad spam. Oh, and it spins. Yes, you too could be the lovely recipient of that in your backyard.

The ad spammers did not like the fact that their name and their handiwork were being splashed all over Flickr. They invoked the DMCA and Flickr pulled down three of the pictures in that stream.

Over on New World Notes, they are reporting about how Rik Riel is trying to provoke a DMCA takedown notice. He is trying to force the issue of intellectual property and fair-use in Second Life. New World Notes makes a good point:

If you're a photojournalist reporting on the news in New York's Time Square, you don't need to get the permission of every business owner whose logo and trademarks will surely show up in the published photo. That's because there's already an established legal precedent of fair use.

I suggest all of you camera mavens and people who live next door to ugliness like this, post to that Flickr group, it would be very hard to takedown everyone.

This also raises the interesting point of what these ad spammers mean for Second Life real estate. The spammers own tiny parcels of land, 16m2, and they try to sell them for large amounts of money. Having them next to you drives down your enjoyment of your land and lowers its resale value. All sorts of things could come about:
1) People move to private sims because you don't have to deal with this.
2) You try to sell your mainland parcel, but can't because of the ads, you have to abandon it.
3) Mainland occupancy goes down, Linden Lab makes less money based on tier.
4) Ad revenue for these things dwindles as traffic dwindles. Eventually the ad land is abandoned due to lack of money.

Basically lots of economic churn, both good and bad.

Porn For Women

A post by the "Are We Not Men" crowd demonstrating how Xcite! would script doing the dishes made me remember a very amusing book called, "Porn For Women".

Guys, close your delicate eyes so you don't see any hardcore porn for women...

Sieg Heil Mein Fuhrer Philip

There is a hilarious video making the rounds of SL blogs. In it Hitler throws a tantrum and the provided sub-titles are written as if it was Philip Rosedale from Linden Labs. Hitler/Philip raves about the 'invasion' of the Open Source pirates who have nearly achieved teleporting on their OpenSim project and who already have SexGen beds.

It's nice to know that the OpenSim people have their priorities straight - sex before teleporting.

Some choice quotes:
"[why can't we go] ... back to the days where you could shit in box and sell it!! Before people was smart!!"
"At least we still have Orientation Island... WITH AN 80% DROP-OUT RATE!! WHOS IDEA WAS TO MAKE IT SO STUPID!! I tried to go there last night... to reassure myself... I like it still, I rode the Segway... BUT I COULD NOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET OFF IT!! THEN I GOT STUCK IN THE GROUND!!11"



"All I ever wanted to do... ...was make a virtual utopia where people could own fake land."

I love that quote - it pretty much sums up Second Life :)

I saw the first link to it from Vint's blog where an interesting thing came up in the comments. People in Germany and France seem unable to watch the video. I believe it is illegal to display the swastika and other symbols of Nazi Germany in those two countries and I believe that YouTube is blocking anything tagged with 'Hitler', etc from viewing by people from those countries.

It makes me glad I live in a country where I can watch parodies of "mass-murdering fuck-heads" without the government thinking I must be a Nazi sympathizer or that it would corrupt me.

Maybe we should all go around chanting 'Seig Heil' ('Hail Victory' for the Germanically challenged) like the Germans did as their country died. Nicely ironic. Perhaps the Second Life equivalent is 'having sex in SexGen beds as the Grid crashes around us.'

Hmmm, perhaps all those freebie penises doing the 'Nazi Salute' have been telling us something all along...

Expanding Beyond Your Core Competency

Lillie Yifu is expanding beyond her 'core competency' of escorting to hold a 'working with huge prims' class this weekend. As long as I'm not tied up, literally, I plan to go. Well, if I can wrap my blond brain around remembering an event that far in the future, which is part of why I'm writing this post.

She is making good on her 2008 resolution to get out of the escorting business and is also making more of her kinetic art. I wish her the best of luck, escorting is, or was, an easy way to pick up some quick cash, but as a sustainable 'business', unless you provide photos or other saleable goods, you can never make more money than you can type (or vocalize). Using her creativity to make things she can continue to sell over and over will, I think, make her more money and more happy in the long run.

Perhaps I should expand out of my core competency of being a bimbo, but some people may remark that I've already done too much expanding and am already too experienced with huge prims.

Been There, Done That, Got The Sucker Marks To Prove It

The Herald has an amusing article about the "new" fad - tentacle sex (article is not work safe at any sane workplace). They rave about it in an amusing way and claim to have found the "source" of the fetish, a specific designer. Unfortunately for them, I've seen it around before now, first at "Mistress Knows Best" and then at "Sensual Stoneworks," and it's probably not original there either.

Been there, done that, got the sucker marks to prove it. Perhaps, "I had sex with an Elder God and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

The thing about it that elevated it to a commentable article was this very well-done comment:

Oh, one day, if only the public would quit being so bigoted and realize that the love between an Elder God-like monster and its doomed prey is as valid and important as the love between an anthropomorphic fox and an anime-inspired llama in a diaper, or even the love between grown adults who like to roleplay as children and get they nasty on after virtual pre-school. I think it will take some time, fellow seekers - mainly because these things will never be taken seriously outside of your special little fetish world.

This goes back to a number of things I mentioned in the Gay Furry Nazi Robot post - the range of specificity in kinks in SL is truly enormous.

Daily Bimbo 2

Since the last post didn't have a very high bimbo quotient, I'll give you another dose of bimbo for your enjoyment. You've all probably seen this one by now, but no collection of bimbos should be without this one.

Miss Teen USA 2007 from South Carolina explains why some Americans, excuse me, some "US Americans" cannot find the US on a map:

Why didn't *I* think of that, duh, of course it's because they don't *have* maps. And because of, like South Africa and Iraq and stuff. See, she's one of the smart ones, she's figured out the big problem with US American education - the lack of proper materials. I wish I was as smart as her.

Pontiac Is Closing Up Shop In SL

The SLNN and the SL Herald are reporting that Pontiac is leaving SL and closing it's sim. Like I was saying the other day about the cement plant, companies are going to be coming and going until they figure out what SL is for, just like they had to find out what the Internet was for a decade ago. The article makes a couple of interesting points:

Motorati was one of the few corporate builds that seemed to get SL right -- offering not a ghost island, but regular events and races and offering free land for people who were making contributions to Second Life car culture.
...
Sad but probably true. Until corporations stop thinking of SL as an advertising billboard and start actually building something of lasting value the metaverse is is going to be in Neutral and the gauges are going to read Fail.

[Updated since I accidentally hit the 'publish' button instead of the 'save'.]
What do you want in a corporate sim? What do you want in a corporate website? Well, if I ever thought of buying a Pontiac car, I might go to the Pontiac website to learn more about their cars, their company, and their service plans, all of which can be presented very nicely in a website. What can't I find on their website that can be provided in SL? Live help and advice? A 3D view of what their car's look like (although really good photos would possibly be just as good).

I don't know anything about car culture really, so this is all conjecture, but one thing that SL can provide is live interaction - and I don't mean by driving the cars. Perhaps they could have live help, but that could be provided by phone or taking your car to the service station. Perhaps they could provide a 'build options' thingie where you could put together your own car and see what all of the options/colors/etc look like. (Although a flash based picture on a website is still pretty good.) Most of these things can easily be done on a website or over phone as well.

The real advantage SL may have is in providing a place for a Pontiac community, where people who like and drive Pontiac cars can go to be steeped in all things Pontiac. Club meetings, shows, and public question and answer sessions with Pontiac engineers and experts are all possibilities. Anything where a group would like to interact. To build that community, they'd need Pontiac info, cars, events, etc. it sounds pretty much like what they had - although I don't think I was ever there and can't tell from personal experience.

A website can provide information readily, but it can't provide good, live interaction, especially with a group. Pontiac could have used their sim as a public face for the company to communicate with their customers. Not as advertising, but as public relations. For example, if Apple wanted to build a sim, they could put all sorts of nice displays and give away free objects modeled after their computers. But that would only be the surface, the real value would be in providing a Genius bar, learning sessions, Mac group meetings, and, basically, a place for Mac-heads to hang out and be Mac geeks together and talk all about Macs. Also, public announcements that don't warrant a full stage show like MacWorld or that you want to interact with people who can't make it to a big stage show like MacWorld.

SL is good at group interaction at a level of the proletariat, not at the level of reporters and insiders.

It's The Year Of The Bimbo And The Gay Nazi Robot Furries Are Yiffing

Lillie IMed me the other day and said she was going to dub 2008 the 'Year of the Bimbo' because it had an hour-glass figure built right in. I don't remember a bimbo on my Chinese restaurant table setting. She wrote her list of ins and outs for 2008 in the Looking Glass magazine blog. Here are some highlights:

Out: Blow jobs
In: Roleplay sex scenes

I bet the guys will be disappointed to find that blow jobs are out, dressing up in a skimpy French maids outfit may distract them for a while, but I think they'll still want blow jobs.

Out: Hoes
In: Bimbos

I don't want to know what sordid uses gardening implements have been used for, but I'm happy to hear that bimbos will be in good favor this year.

Out: Big Ugly Boots
In: Prim Shoes from Shiny Things

Were 'Big Ugly Boots' ever good things?

Out: Cheap prim skirts
In: Couture influenced pants

You want to dress your bimbos in pants?

Out: Barbies
In: Boobs
Out: Barbies
In: Upscale

Bimbo's are in, but you exclude our exemplar? Sacrilege! Melissa will be happy to hear that boobs are in, though.

Out: AOs with Model poses
In: MOCAP dances
Out: Sinwave
In: Zhao
Out: Hug attachments
In: Rendez-Vous

MOCAP? Zhao (as in the open source AO)? Rendez-Vous? Huh? Speak English slowly, I'm blond.

Out: Partnering
In: Collaring

Yay!

Out: Men as women escorts
In: Men as women characters in roleplay

Either way, they should walk a mile in our heels sometimes.

Out: Orgy Rooms
In: Bondage Rooms

Both, please :)

Out: Cheap Sex Beds
In: SexGen Diamond

Diamond! Does it have more than my platinum? BTW, did they ever fix those annoying chains and use one of the Lock* varieties?

Out: Threesomes
In: Four way

Will it be 5-way next year?

Out: Blingy Shoes
In: Armidi Boots

Awww, but bling is so cheesy it's fun.

Out: Nazi Fur
In: Gay yiffing

Early last year, I saw a group in the group-list that was something like, 'Vampire Gorean Furries' and I thought that was a pretty precise kink. "Unless I'm a platinum blond fox (literally) Free Woman running for my life in a raid on my city from a bunch of blood-sucking undead domineering slave owners in pink bunny outfits who want to dress me in silks, I just can't get off." How often does that happen? Once a century? Which in Second Life time is like every 10 minutes...

Maybe it could be gay Nazi robot furries yiffing or something like that.

Which makes one of the earlier bits of Lillie's list more obvious:
Out: Cheap SL Sex
In: Long Roleplay

With setups like these, you are going to need long sessions. "Okay honey, now that I'm tied up by my toes with a latex surgeon's mask and a steel wool bikini on and you are dressed up like Cary Grant from 'Some Like It Hot' wearing silver-spurred cowboy boots and a lizard's tail and Elvis is singing 'Blue Suede Shoes' we can begin. God am I so hot and turned on right now. Oh, don't forget to put the peanut butter covered soft-boiled egg on the chair over there for later. I said the chair not the conveyor belt! The chair and the egg come after the conveyor belt. Can't you get anything right? You just ruined the entire mood for me, I'm no longer turned on, we'll just have to start all over again. And this time, try to get it right."

Yeah, this year is going to be fun. I'm off to install the conveyor belt.

Your Daily Dose Of Bimbo

Since some people were disappointed with the lack of bimbo content in my previous post, I thought I'd give you more bimbo in this post.

Here is a bimbo on a game show explaining how her husband is urban, why he had to go to the doctor because he's urban, and that the doctor gave her something because of it. Thankfully he's only been urban for two months.

See she's definitely a dumb bimbo, everyone knows you go to the doctor because of your husband's rural.

Bait Shops, Cement Plants, And Dogfood

Over on Girl Meets Second Life, Caterin spent an afternoon at an SL Cement Plant. A cement works in SL? Is it part of an urban role-playing game? Evidently, the cement works is from FLSmidth, ‘FLSmidth is a Danish world-leading manufacturer of cement and minerals plants’. It's like a cement plant theme park. What do they expect out of SL?

This reminds me a lot of the early pioneering days of the Internet. Back then, everyone was jumping on the bandwagon - they didn't know where it was going or what it meant, but everyone was talking about it, so they had to be there.

The Internet was a heady, confusing, eclectic, mixture of sites back then. There were new forms of money, dog food was being shipped at exorbitant rates, and everything was free. How do cement companies figure into this? Well, small business was trying to get on the Internet or the Information Superhighway as the press was hyping it back then.

Small companies, who had no other desire or need to get on the Internet except that their CIO read about it in a magazine, were trying to make websites. Most of these failed.

Friends of mine who, at the time, worked building websites for companies tell me about small businesses coming to them and asking for websites. When asked what did they want it for, what purpose did it serve, and fundamentally, what did they expect, had no idea other than, "we need a website, if we don't have one, we'll be left behind."

"Left behind" of what, they had no idea about, but everyone was raving about it, so like greedy little kids, they wanted one and they wanted people to go to it. They thought it would drive real world sales. Website builders kept telling these small companies that you needed to "be different", to make the site like "a game" or to "give something away for free." The common logic was that you had to provide something that consumers wanted so that they would come see your real world products and then go buy them. I don't know about you, but I didn't sit around going to big name brand web sites playing cruddy games and then thinking, "I want a Big Mac."

To this day, some companies still think like that, have you ever been to Pepsi's website? Me neither. I've heard they run contests and they used to provide games to play, or something like that, maybe that was Coke's website or was that any of a number of other big, real world brands.

I've been watching Second Life since I came to it over a year ago and it bears much resemblance to the early days of the Internet. The graphics sucked, really, a child with crayons made better icons than what passed for cutting edge on the old websites and the first things in Second Life also look like anyone could make it. The ease of writing a simple web page and throwing together some graphics so that nearly everyone did it is very similar to how the simple prim and texture objects that we build with in Second Life are right now. Do you see many of those types of websites floating around on anything other than hobbyist pages? I didn't think so. You either spend lots of money to have an IT department to have a site or you use an internet application like Blogger or eBay Stores. If you are really fancy you use a "website in a box" on a rented server, like WordPress.

If we look at Second Life to determine what it will look like ten years from now, we will see that big corporate sites like Pepsi are only useful for finding the phone number so you can call to complain about their real world products and not much else. I think that Playboy and other sims are going to end like this. The real winners are sites that allow you to find what you are looking for or to buy those hard to find things. But, perhaps the most successful will be like the unforeseen winners of today. Perhaps, there will even be a new revolution in user content, like what you are reading right now, a blog.

The big counter-point to the "all websites are professional" is that most of what we do on the Internet outside of shopping is social networking, blogging, and watching videos and it's created by amateurs for consumption by amateurs. That is remarkably like Second Life. Is Second Life a YouTube, for person to person interaction, or is Second Life, like Linden Labs would lead you to believe, a platform like the Internet? I think it really is a platform and you are going to see more "Bill Joe Jim Bob's Bait Shop" style sims until both big and little business figures out what it's doing.

Eventually the real selling will arise and we will be using Second Life to buy furniture and clothes online because now we can actually "see and touch" them. You wait, open registration is only the beginning, Linden is probably thinking about registration-less Second Life, so that Ikea can point its website to a sim in Second Life with models of all of their furniture where you can see how it looks next to all of your other furniture and then purchase it. Or enter your measurements, an avatar is created and now you can see what an outfit will look like on you. Some sites are already doing something like this with your picture and trying out new hair-cuts before you go to a salon.

Then will come the "new media", similar to blogs or YouTube, what will we be trading around? 3D models, animations, toys and gadgets? Maybe. All I know is that for Second Life to realize its potential as a new "platform" it will have to become more open, not less. Less like a pay-per-month game like Warcraft and more like a browser - always there. Will Linden Lab go the way of Netscape, giving us a browser and a server for free, then dying? I don't think so, the asset server, lindens, and a few other things prevents that.

Anyway, enough pontificating and conjecturing, now I really do want to go find small businesses like the cement one and get any freebies they are giving away. I missed out on the "big freebie giveaways" of the mid to late 90s. Give me my free loot!

What Age Are You? No, Really?

This has to take the cake. After Linden Lab said it was going to age and identify verify people, the catterwaling began. From end to end of the Second Life blogo-sphere, many posts were written and much vitriol spewed. None the less, Linden Lab persisted in it's desire to make identify verification part of Second Life.

So, what happens when someone is accused of being under-aged? "Oh, look at that, they used the verification system chosen by Linden Lab." You'd think that would be the end of it. Well, not so fast.

From over on Grid Grind (via Massively), they are reporting one of their alts was suspended and they were told to fax a copy of a picture ID for verification!

With not a second look at their own verification system, Linden Lab is demanding picture proof of your identity in cases where there has been a complaint against you. Their own carefully selected system doesn't stand up to meet their own burden of proof.

A comment on Massively answers the charge that it's supposedly only a beta program:

Bee Mizser said...

So they are not trusting a system in BETA....

God you are getting worse than the Herald.

Age Verification is undergoing testing, it has not gone fully live, so quite rightly they are not depending on it right now.

Reply
2 hearts vote downvote upReport
Tateru Nino9

Dec 24th 2007 @ 5:54AM
Tateru Nino said...

As far as we know, and from everything we've heard, the 'beta' aspect is to deal with people *not* being able to verify. Once people *are* verified, as far as we know, they'll stay that way at the end of beta - therefore, if you trust the data then, you trust it now, no?

IF IT'S NOT USEFUL, WHY THE FUCK DO WE HAVE IT?!?!?!?!?!?!

Sorry about that, I just had to scream at the world about something so blindingly stupid.

I'm An AlienHearts Groupie

It's been ages since I heard AlienHearts play live and they were back for a big party this weekend. In case you've never heard of them, they are three very good DJs from France who play electrance music and make incredibly funny comments in-between their songs.



You can go to their website, www.alienhearts.com, to download their music or get a small promo-sample of it by clicking the play button in the embedded player below.

To get a feel for their sense of humor, let me direct you to one of their videos on YouTube, it's called NooB and it's the tale of a noobie to Second Life.



Just to confirm my groupie status, I would add any of the three to my Naughty Nine, I dance on the stage when they play, I flirt shamelessly with them, and I have been known to throw various pieces of clothing onto their DJ booths. If anyone who reads this and runs a club or event that wants good music from professional DJs, I couldn't recommend anyone better. They packed a four sim party today.

If you hire them, you can be certain I will attend. Isn't that a good enough reason alone?

The Naughty Nine

Sigh, another meme, this one via Veyron. And a big hrmph to Veyron for only wanting to have sex with me for my mind.

Name the avatar that you would most like to have sl sex with for…..

1. Their av.

Veyron Supercharge - yes, I only like you for your body :P

2. Their mind.

Nicole Rotunno - although soul and many other attributes could also apply here :)

3. Their poetic/mystical/creative spirit.

Malachite Seattle - She's an incredible builder who kept Helena interested, I can only imagine what she must be like.

Wolfgang Pfohl - I wish he'd log in again, it's been too long. His boyish earnestness, his ego, his RL creativity, and many other reasons.

Dalien Talbot - You should hear him sing ;)

4. Their social success/success in sl.

Zoe Connelly - I've heard rumors ;)

5. Their libido, that is the thing they seem to want to do from how they talk and act.

Helena Kirkorian - How can anyone resist her? I think they invented the word effervescent just for her.

6. Want to go against type for you. That is, if they are normally a top, you would want them to be your bottom, if they are straight and your same sl gender…

Dakota Enfield - She's attached to Brianicus and I haven't talked to her in ages, but her wit and deep personality always attracted me.

Vint Falken - I'd really like to just curl up and play neko-kitty games with her ;)

October Hush - With the recent revelations, I'm thinking she might be hiding more things.

7. You would go against type for.

Trinity Clift - I've been going against type since day one already and I'm not about to stop?

8. You would most want to do a nothing-but-sex week with, who you are not currently having sl sex with.

I'm having sex with everyone right now, who am I missing? :)

9. Threesome, which two. They don’t have to be from the above list, but can be.

Veyron and Nicole. And thanks to Vint's photo-shoot, I bet it's going to happen :)

The tenth question:

“The forbidden,” the one that, you’d like to publicly confess to, but the consequences would be toooooo awful. Examples would be your best friend’s partner, a professional contact, someone you know rl who is here… Someone who you want, but have never been able to confess it too. Don’t post… Just answer with whether they are online right at the moment that you post your answer.

Not online :(

Next tags... October Hush, Dalien Talbot, Melissa Yeuxdeux, and Alexander Burgess.

Visitors To My Palace

When looking for photos of me on the Internet, I found some great photos taken by people I don't know of my palace. They did a good job of capturing some of the insides of it. My palace looks very Arabian Nights from the outside and a French palace in certain parts of the inside.

Here's someone named, Tsai Jie looking out of one of the upper rooms towards one of the minarets.



Here she is in my library in one of the comfy couches near the big fireplace.



Finally, here she is snuggling with someone in one of the big flowers in my garden.



I'm happy someone can be enjoying my palace when I'm not there. I'm also very happy to be able to say, "my palace." :)

Latex Bimbo Neko

It seems our aspiring latex bimbo neko took a photo a few months ago of me, in one of my neko outfits and made some appreciative comments about it. I think she's been thinking about this for a while.


Personally, I like the butterfly, its wings beat in a nice animation. This outfit has an interesting story tied to because I used it as a basis for my Halloween costume in Real Life. The humorous (and scandalous) results of that will be told in the next installment of the Mistress Stangelove series.

Up With This I Will Not Put

I was looking to collect some of the images I've seen people post about me in the past and put references to them on here. It turns out Flickr search is horrible and things tagged with my name don't even show up in the search results for 'tiessa'. I decided to use Google's image search to find more images of me.

The first result in Google's image search for me is *the* photo by Vint!

Some People Are Crabby Spoil Sports

In researching if my blog is still #1 on the "make me a bimbo" search at Google, I looked at some of the other links and this one stuck out as being very amusing, but not in the way the author intended.

First off, look at the pictures of the people who write for that newspaper's blog, can you picture a less humorless bunch of people? I grew up in the Midwest, can you guess why I don't live there anymore?

Second, comments like, "These girls will never be happy until they decide to grow up," show the true nature of the commenter more than the nature of the target of their ire. That really should be re-phrased as, "I will never be happy until they decide to grow up." What a curmudgeon view of the universe this person espouses. I think it's just sour grapes that the author of that comment wishes they would have had a bit more of an "ill-spent youth" and enjoyed themselves.

Finally, the comments quickly degenerate into a bunch of "You young people are all ungrateful and lazy." But, chalk one up for the bimbos of the world with the following comment exchange:

Regardless, the actions of a few idiots shouldn't reflect on my entire generation.
Posted by: young air-head spoiled bimbo | June 06, 2007 at 08:41 AM

Sorry bimbo, but it's not just "the actions of a few idiots". A major portion of your generation act like they're a few bricks shy of a load. That said, your generation isn't much different than any other recent generation. You just need a little seasoning/maturity/experience. I'm confident yours will be a productive generation given some time (and age).
Posted by: XXX | June 06, 2007 at 09:15 AM

XXX,
Let me say again, self righteous baby boomers make me laugh. I see a few brick short of a full load when I see my parents old high school friends that were taken in by the drug culture of the seventies and are now brain dead.

Me? Just graduated on dean's list, and landed a very good job thanks to persistant interviewing and persuing.

But don't worry. The baby boomer generation will be very productive at some point.... I'm sure. Really. One of these days...
Posted by: Bimbo | June 07, 2007 at 10:11 AM

Social Rank And Sweet Second Life Useless?

I think Crap Mariner is right, SocialRank and SweetSecondLife are full of crap. I submitted my own site to them, I also made certain blogs like Vint's and Veyron's were submitted to them, considering how much traffic they get. Not one of these four blogs show up on their social rank. Looking at SL TopSites, Technorati, and others, at least one of these sites should make it into SocialRank. But no. Electric Sheep, however, shows up twice. I think their site is broken.

A Bit Of Self-Indulgent Narcissism

Being bored with the concept of doing work today, having already posted to the blog, and having not looked at my site analytics in a while, I decided to look and see what people have been finding on my site.

The high ranking keywords for my site are, "All Things Tiessa", no surprise there, "SL Escorts", hmmm, I haven't done that in ages, "make me a bimbo", a perennial favorite on this blog, "second life big boobs", and, interestingly enough, a phrase that is second only to "All Things Tiessa", "Aristotle, he made a claim that later proved incorrect." Where else can you get bimbos, big boobs, and discussions of the veracity of Aristotle in one cute package? Oh, and I have the most darling dimples as well :)

The current top links are I Is A Smart Bimbo, "Long Absences And Unexpected Exposures", and "Fear Of Barbie's Big Boobs".

Hmmm, I sense a theme :)

Just as a sort of weird recursive irony, the "Make Me A Bimbo" reference on my site, which is one of my hit generators, is another post commenting on how that phrase is one of my hit generators. No actual content was produced in the making of this hit driver.

Re-reading that post of mine, I definitely have to do a series of 'A Bimbo's Guide to...' posts with 'A Bimbo's Guide To Being A Bimbo,' being one of the first. I bet the Mean Girls would have a field day with me if I ever made it onto their radar.

What Do I Have To Do To Get A Little Publicity?

I flirt and I flirt, he takes pictures, but then he goes and forgets to mention the best part of the entire party, me! And I'm even the only person you can make out in the picture he posts of the party. I should be glad he didn't feature an embarrassing photo of me in his tutorial on post-processing of cleavage like some people I could mention...

And Now For Something Completely Different...

A small break from everything you wanted to know about sex and the single Second Life girl...

You either love British humor, or you don't. Be forewarned, if you don't like British humor, don't read this post, go here instead, you'll be much happier.

From the daily mash, a site that makes The Onion look like it was written by boring 4-year olds, comes the following artitle:

'LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS FUCKING RAT' SAY ZOOLOGISTS

A TOTALLY humongous rat has been discovered in a really remote part of New Guinea by some freaked-out zoologists.

A team of scientists from Conservation International spotted the absolutely mental thing while up to their knees in all kinds of crap in the Foja mountains.

Expedition leader Professor Wayne Hayes said: "I was filling my water bottle when I saw this huge fucking thing and I shouted to my mate Dave, I said, 'Dave, look at the size of that fucker!' and Dave was like, 'Jesus Christ, it's a fucking monster!

...

Professor Hayes added: "Ben was like, 'that's a rat, it's totally a rat' and I was going, 'naah, it's some kind of freaky beaver or a weird-looking, fucked-up cat.'"

Dr David Hobbs added: "I was like, 'that's a mutant otter or something, it's bigger than my dog, for Christ's sake' and Wayne was saying we should catch it, and I was like, 'you fucking catch it'.

"So anyway, we tell Stevie that it's his turn to catch something and he's like totally pissed off, but he tears after it anyway, shouting, 'come here you dirty big bastard, I want to take your picture'."

Dr Steven McKay added: "We also trapped this manky little thing with huge eyes which they reckon is maybe a possum or a really big gerbil.

I know, this isn't the most erudite humor around, but it tickles my funny bone for a couple of reasons. I used to watch nature shows on PBS when I was growing up and the thought of Sir David Attenborough creeping through the jungles in the Foja mountains, parting the leaves of some big plant, turning to the camera, and saying in hushed tones, "Ahh, the elusive Big Fucking Rat, a rare sight indeed." That image makes me giggle uncontrollably, the people around me on the bus must think I'm insane.

I also vaguely remember a few "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" episodes from when I was really little and I remember the host, Marlin Perkins, would be talking all about how deadly some creature was and then he'd turn to Jim Fowler and say something like, "Even though the much feared man-eating Bengal tiger can rend a man limb from limb in seconds, Jim here is going to go up to it, pull on its tail so you can hear it roar, a roar that sends chills to the hearts of man. Then, he will put his head in its mouth so you can see the teeth that can crush a man's skull in an instant." Poor Jim would then dutifully go and perform whatever insane stunt Marlin would assign him. I often wondered why Marlin hated Jim so much.

If he survived, I can just hear someone saying to him, "Lucky."

Well, to reward everyone who read through this entire post of my prattling, I will give the first one who answers the following question correctly with a long kiss and a quick fondle in the back of a dark theatre.

From my one of my favorite pieces by the same authors who brought you the title of this post, who would turn and say "Lucky" to Jim if he survived the insane instructions Marlin gave him? It's a bit obscure, but it never fails to make me laugh because of the absurdity of the situation. If no one gets it, I'll eventually tell you, but then, no cookie for you.

This Is Either Bad Or Good

Cory Lindon is leaving Linden Lab, in his own words, it appears to be over creative differences. Some people think this is a bad thing, that he is the guy that "made it work". I love the following quote from Cory:

Creating a programming language that now had 2.5 billion lines of code written in it – note to self, next time spend more than one night designing language.

That brings back memories of bad architectural decisions in my life as well.

Now, I'm going to preface all of the following, with, I haven't met Cory, have any inside information about this in anyway, or have any personal axes to grind.

I think this could be a very good thing. Send any flames my way you want, but I don't believe anyone's perfect.

Cory built a platform that I've dedicated lot's of time to and certainly a fair amount of money. Anything I spend that much time with, I have an opinion on. He made this crazy concept a working system. It has many flaws that are keeping it from being truly great and continuing the breakneck growth it showed earlier.

There are crashes, bugs, outages, inventory loss,and numerous other things that mar the Second Life experience. Cory could be a very good software engineer, very creative, very innovative, but he may not make a good CTO. The skills that are good at starting a project and getting it to the "first stage" are not the skills that get you to the "next stage." They are not mutually exclusive, but they are not the same.

Unlike others, I like that Cory made the client open source. I like that he supported libsecondlife. I drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago about open source and how fundamentally right it is.

All of that does not make him good at managing the architecture of a system, to stabilize it, to hunker down and do the boring things that need to be done on the platform. Some people are comparing him to Wozniak and drawing similarities to what happened at Apple. I think Wozniak leaving was ultimately good for Apple.

I read an excerpt from Michael Dell's book in which he talked about having to ask for the resignations of many of his close friends that helped him build Dell once the company grew really big. His comments went something like, "It was incredibly hard to do, they were good $100 million dollar managers, but they weren't $1 billion dollar managers." The skill set for running organizations and making them work at different sizes and different scales changes. Some can continue to reinvent themselves and change, others cannot or will not.

In the end Linden Lab is a business and businesses that grow and are pushing to grow big will go through certain stages. We've hit the "boring corporate retrenchment" stage. I just hope that Cory isn't replaced by someone from the "big corporate" stage, who doesn't know how to shepherd a growing company through the middle phases.

I Might As Well Tell You Eight Random Facts

I guess after receiving numerous tags (You know who you are), I will succumb to peer pressure...

Rules:
* Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1) Unlike my normal charming and ebullient self, right now, I can't think of anything witty to say.
2-8) See #1, only with different polysyllabic words substituted to increase my blog's reading level.

If you really want random facts about me, re-read the Mistress Strangelove series.

Besides, all of the good facts were taken. Like dandellion, I will set my avatar down in a comfortable chair somewhere in the middle of a shopping sim and move my camera about to do all of my shopping, although I don't "spiderman" around like she does.

Like Veyron, I have an incredibly organized inventory - I have all of my "looks" in separate folders, labeled as to what they are compatible with. Copies of my shape, skin, eyes, hair, jewelry, etc. all in the same folder (with sub-folders :), so a single menu click will change my entire look. The only disorganized folder is my animations, and that's because I just bought some and have to classify them. Unlike Veyron, I really don't want a tagging system, I'd never remember all of the tags and then I would spend a *huge* amount of time "standardizing" my tags, I'd like either symlinks or just have everything be copy/no transfer.

Finally, like Raul, I was in the Navy and have tattoos all over my body, but unlike him I have my driver's license and am a 400 pound truck driver who wears red plaid, has a beard to my belly, and who answers to the call sign, "Bubba Joe Jim Bob Billy".

:P

Like usual, I'm in an odd mood, which would just make it a normal mood, well for me, for everyone else, it'd be odd.

Like Vint, I will cease the "chain letter" and not tag anyone - I'd have to spend hours googling for random SL blogs to find someone who hasn't been tagged already.

Mission Specialist Bambi And Her Amazing Pneumatic Space Sex Toys

Veyron has a link to a hysterical article about sex in space on her blog. A copy of her excerpt:

US and Russian
astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on
how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book
published yesterday.

Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The
Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both
at Nasa [sic] and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings
have taken place.

“The issue of sex in space is a serious one,” he says. “The
experiments carried out so far relate to missions planned for married
couples on the future International Space Station, the successor to
Mir. Scientists need to know how far sexual relations are possible
without gravity.”

He cites a confidential Nasa [sic] report on a space shuttle mission in
1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions
possible in a weightless atmosphere.

Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the
best 10, he says. “Two guinea pigs then tested them in real
zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered
so sensitive that even Nasa [sic] was only given a censored version.”

Only four positions were found possible without “mechanical
assistance”. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable
tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.

Mr Kohler says: “One of the principal findings was that the classic
so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity
pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.”

This is priceless. I wonder how they convinced the guinea pigs to try those 10 positions :) I can see "serious scientists in lab coats" rigging up miniature sex harnesses to the guinea pigs and then saying in a stern voice, "now this time, no playing around, I want you to test the missionary position, not Kama Sutra position #712. That position is not one of the 'official' ones we are testing on this flight. Get serious you two, you are astronauts, not rodents." Followed by little rodent giggles as they go off to have wild, kinky rodent sex in harnesses while inside an inflatable tunnel.

My mind boggles at all of the questions this article raises. For example, how do I get a government paid job to write software to simulate sexual positions in space? That must be one of the wackier job descriptions, "Must have experience in physical simulation using 3D software and an intense interest in sex." How did they get that by HR?

What other "mechanical assistance" devices did they simulate? And how did they think of an inflatable tunnel as one of them? "Well, Sir, last night I was up late doing some, ah, 'research' on the Internet with regards to, ah, 'possible mechanical devices for aiding in engineering human to human coupling and interlocking in zero gravity', and I, ah, 'chanced' upon a website dedicated to, ah, 'human restraint in procreative and non-motile scenarios'. Then purely out of, ah, 'scientific curiosity', I downloaded all of the pictures on it, so I could do some, ah, 'in-depth analysis', and I saw a few things that might be the key to, ah, 'facilitating...', ah, um... Sir, permission to speak without euphemism?" "Just one question first Johnson. How much of this 'research' was done with your pants down around your ankles?" Looking abashed, Johnson answers, "all of it Sir."

Don't even get me started on how their "principal finding" was about the missionary position. I would love to read the research grant proposal for that one.

Also, it gives new meaning to the words, "Mission Specialist" Not to be confused with the words, "Missionary Specialist," which is evidently an untenable position.

I can imagine the pre-flight press interview... "I'm Smith from the Associated Press, and I have a question for Mission Specialist, ah, 'Bambi' is it? The press hand-out regarding your background is very short and very vague, your title is 'Research Assistant' and your background states that you have, ah, '... significant professional experience of vital importance to the mission.' But it never states what that experience is, can you provide more details?" Bambi, smacking her gum and twirling a finger in her bleached platinum blond hair, replies, "uh, what the heck did all that mean?" "What are you good at miss?" "Why didn't you just say that, handsome?" she smiles and bats her eyelashes at the suddenly uncomfortable reporter who has to sit down quickly and adjust his pants. "That's easy, I give great head, I'm double jointed, I don't get motion sick during sex, and I ride rockets every night," she giggles at her own joke. "Although, I am charging extra for the straps, inflatable tunnels, and the guinea pigs - that's kinky even by my standards. It has been great working with all of the guys down in the research department these past weeks, there were many long, sleepless nights spent rehearsing all of the astronauts I'm to do in space, oh wait, I was supposed to say, 'tasks that I'm to do in space,'" she says while using exaggerated "air quotes". "We plan to have a lot of fun on this mission, right Tiger," she ends winking at the, now blushing, Mission Commander.

I Do *Not* Act LikeThis... (Frequently)

Veyron has cast more aspersions on my character, making me out to be nothing more than a flirtatious tart. She sent me the following video and implied that this is essentially me and how I act.

Super Sexy Train Passenger - Free videos are just a click away
I can assure you all this is entirely unlike me. First, I don't ride trains, second, I'm blond, third, I would never wear an outfit like that because the top does not go well with that skirt. Finally, to really attract the eyes of the guys, don't wear black heels, wear white. Any stripper can tell you that.

See, entirely unlike me.

(Note: The use of polysyllabic words is in no way a reaction to the "bimbo" reading level of this blog.)

Words Cannot Do It Justice

Earlier this year, during the summer, a bunch of people told me about a sim where the "Starry Night" painting of Van Gogh was brought to life in Second Life. Life many other pilgrims, I ventured there to marvel at how well it was done and the magnificent idea that it represented - the ability to travel within one of your favorite paintings.

Robbie Dingo built it and this morning I stumbled accross a machinima called 'Watch the World(s)" showing the build from beginning to end. I can't say which is more impressive, watching it being built or moving around within it. Making it even more poignant is the music, Don McLean's "Vincent", it makes me sniffle and tear up hearing the words as the painting unfolds. Some parts of the video have been edited to appear abstract.

It is probably the best machinima I've ever seen - I can't stop watching it.

For a very low-res version of it, here's the YouTube version:


For more details on how it was made, New World Notes has an article about it. Finally, for higher resolution versions, go to Robbie's blog - the download is well worth it.

Mega-Prim Sculptie Earth With Satellite Imagery

I *have* to see this the next time I'm in Second Life. This is incredible looking in the photos.

From the picture caption:

Sculptie Earth features a topographic Earth model with cloud layer that displays real time weather patterns streamed from satellite data. Stills are taken 3 hours apart and 2 days of data is visible in the animation.


The first photo shows how big it is relative to other things in Second Life.

The second shows it close enough to see the relief.

The pictures are from Zee Pixel's Flickr stream.

And thanks to the Huge Prim Blog for the pointer.

You Know You're Famous When....

You make it into a word search puzzle. Dinee has a word search puzzle with a bunch of SL bloggers in it. Thanks Dinee.

I also think it says something about me that I also notice “naughty” words like ‘tit’ or crass consumer words like ‘jewel’. Not that I’m a gold-digging nympho or anything.

Now, if I can only make it into her blogroll. Of course, that would mean having to post more frequently and with more exciting things.

I Is A Smart Bimbo

Following the example of other authors, like Melissa Yeuxdoux and Lillie Yifu, rating the reading level of their blogs, I ran mine through the same service and guess what reading level this blog is:

Lillie's smart, she's in elemenshur... elmnt... grade school and Melissa's real smart, she's got rockets and jello shots on hers :)

Late Night. Can't Sleep.

It's 2AM and you can't sleep, what do you do? You wander around the Internet and find out what people have been writing about you while you weren't looking :)

Narcissim, thy name is Tiessa.

You find out that you haven't posted in nearly two months. You internally vow to return to your origins and log into Second Life more frequently. You begin to write a self-referential, hopefully humorous blog post about the whole situation, only to find out that you are nearly incoherent from lack of sleep. *sigh*

Perhaps I'll call it a night and go back to counting male strippers as I try to fall asleep. You can count sheep, I want to dream about sex with male strippers when I finally fall asleep - I'll let you dream about sex with sheep. Or maybe I'll try and count Veyron's doing various naughty things. Either way, yum.

What the heck am I doing still writing when I can have visions of boy toys and models dancing in my head?

Okay Vey, I'm An "Uber Cool Nerd God" (dess)

To satisfy Veyron's curiousity about my nerdiness, here it is...





And I must protest a few thing about the test:

The question, "While not at work working, what do you spend most of your time on the computer doing?" does not have the answer that I wanted, which is "writing code". I do not consider that "work", especially since I don't program work stuff :)

The question, "How's your romantic life?" does not have the answer I wanted, which is "Have multiple boyfriends/girlfriends". I guess that would be a vanishingly small sample size for this test anyway - the writers never conceived of anyone being able to pull that off :)

The question, "Speaking of Aristotle, he made a claim that later proved incorrect, which was that..." is wrong on so many levels, it should at least be "Which of the following was one of the claims Aristotle made that was later proven wrong?" - he made so many wrong claims, the use of the word "a" is highly incorrect.

Besides if you are going to choose cool philosophy figures, at least go with Plato or Socrates.

As far as programming languages go, there are far nerdier languages and questions to ask. For example, "Do you consider Lisp to be the best language ever?" Should boost your nerd score through the roof :) BTW, my answer to that would be "depends on the problem" :P

The Jeopardy questions are just stupid - I don't watch the show anymore because its too easy which bores me ;)

Don't even get me started on the inaccuracies of the "The Hundred Years war lasted 106 years." question.

And the fact that I carry a periodic table in my purse "in case of an emergency" does not make me a nerd :) You wouldn't believe how many times that's come in handy.

To be properly nerdy the question about choosing, "Your Life", "My Space", etc. should have an option for "Second Life" or some other comment on choosing a cyber-life instead of a real life, heck even one of those MMO would be better than "My Space" - the kinds of geeks this test is targetting sneer at My Space or wouldn't know social networking if it bit them.

By choosing "Mac" I get "Mac" and "Unix" - I bet they scored me lower for choosing the Mac - I think the test creators are not nerdy enough.

There really should be a question that asks whether or not you think the test is flawed, it doesn't have nerdy enough questions, or that you think the test creators aren't nerdy enough - that should boost your nerd score.

And finally, the term should be Goddess - idiots, didn't they even take into account the "sex" portion of their own test? I call that a bug - where do I go to get my money back?

Long Absences And Unexpected Exposure

Well, Real Life is about to slow down and I can return to writing more of the Mistress Strangelove series for your edification.

However, the reason I'm posting this is an unexpected exposure of me by Vint Falken on her blog. I went to the SL Bloggers meeting and she took a photo of me and is using it as an instruction device on retouching photos.

I just wish she could have used a less titillating photo.

Update (9/14/2007):
I finally followed Vint's link to the Flckr page for the photo and read the comments there.

My favorite one:
"I can't get past "Montgolfier", hot air, balloons.. and her tits."

And that's not even why I chose the name, although now I like it even more than before. Unexpected puns are the best.

The Hummingbird Address

From the steps of her palace in Hummingbird sim, Tiessa walks up to the podium to give her, soon to be famous, Hummingbird Address. This speech comes at a time of great strife in Second Life and she wishes to communicate her feelings about the condition of Second Life and her candidacy for Governorship of Second Life.

"Four score and sixteen months ago Phil brought forth on this net, the Linden Labs, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all avatars are created equal."

"Now we are afflicted by a great system outage, testing whether Second Life, or any Life so programmed and so untested, can long remain up. We are met on a sim impacted by that outage. We have come to dedicate a portion of that sim, as a final resting place for those avatars who here were disconnected that Second Life might remain up. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this sim. The brave avatars, connected and disconnected, who lived here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The Grid will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what bugs occurred here. It is for us the connected, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who were disconnected here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored avatars we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of connectivity -- that we here highly resolve that these avatars shall not have disconnected in vain -- that this Grid, under Tiessa, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the avatars, by the avatars, for the avatars, shall not perish from the Internet."

Looking solemn and aggrieved, she bows her head in reverence for the departed of Second Life, turns, and walks back to her palace, turning at the last moment before entering to whisper, "Apologies to the President."

Tiessa's Campaign For Governor

Tiessa, dressed smartly and primly in a severe business suit, steps up to the podium. She smiles sweetly to everyone in attendance and launches into her speech without formality or preamble.

"Friends, Lindens, avatars, lend me your IMs;
I come to skewer Phil, not to praise him.
The bugs that SL inflicts affect us all;
The fixes are oft broken in the updates;
So let it be with Phil. The noble media
Hath told you Phil was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Phil answer'd it."

"SL was my friend, faithful and shopping friendly:
But Phil was ambitious;
Having brought lag and bugs to us all.
He hath captivated many with Second Life
Whose wallets did the business' coffers fill:
Did this in Phil seem ambitious?
When that the avatars have cried, Phil hath wept:
Second Life will scale, just one more update will fix it!"

"You all did see that in the Town Hall
We presented him a grievous list,
Which Lindens dodged and spun the news?
Was this ambition bringing all to ruin?"

"I speak not to disprove what the Lindens spoke,
But here I am to speak what I know.
You all did love SL once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to throw out Phil?
O judgment! thou are fled to bad coding practices,
And programmers have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My password is mangled in the database with Phil's,
And I cannot log in until it is reset for me."

"When I do log in, I pledge to you;
Fair avatars and furries all:
My governorship will be beneficent,
The lag and bugs will disappear,
Lindens once again shall fill all hands,
And snoops and puritans shall not peer in
On anything consenting adults will do.
But not while Phil rules the grid."

Tiessa again smiles sweetly to all assembled and leaves the podium, turning at the last moment to whisper, "My apologies to The Bard."

If you are wondering what all this is about, read Vint's or Veyron's blog entries. This was inspired by reading Zoe's speech :)