Looks like our dearest Ruth - the default form for all of us, the way we were rezzed into the grid, the way we appear anytime Second Life can't figure out how it's supposed to make us look - is no more. At least for those of us using the Release Candidate viewer.

Linden Lab announced tonight that as of the newest version (7 I believe? I've lost count, really) of the Release Candidate, Ruth will be no more. According to the release notes:

Newly created avatars without a gender, or any avatar where “clothing is still downloading” are rendered as a cloud rather than naked/wrong body shape.

Goodbye, Ruth. Hello, Cumulonimbus! I guess if you ever want to see Ruth again, you'll have to head to Shapes by Zada and pick up Zada's "Unbreakable Avatar," which is the Ruth shape with a gray skin. (That's me modeling it in the picture above.)

I haven't yet seen a "cloud form" avatar - if anyone has, and has thought to take a screenshot, give me a shout using the "Contact Me" link in the toolbar, and I'll post it here in an update.

UPDATE: Cloud Form Lanna has been spotted! Picture below.

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I’ve been wanting to share something with y’all for a while now, about a publication that I’ve been lucky enough to join recently. While I hinted at it a few weeks ago, I didn’t want to say anything until the first issue bearing my name came out, for fear of jinxing things. And now that it’s out, I still have hesitated to say anything here, for a reason I’ll get to below.

But if you know me, you know I can’t keep my big yapper shut forever. So I’m happy to announce that as of the May issue, I have joined the staff of GLAM World Magazine. You can find the issue here, the article which I wrote jointly with Genna Gray begins on page 51. Yes, it’s about the history of men’s fashion in Second Life. No, I knew next to nothing about the subject before we wrote the article. What can I say, I love a challenge.

I really couldn’t be more honored to join the magazine. If you’ve never read an issue before, Caliah Lyon and her staff put together a well-written and visually exquisite product every month. Some of the photo layouts rival what you’d find in RL fashion magazines. While I don’t think I can do much to help on the visual end of things, I will certainly do what I can to add to the well-written part.

By this point, you’re probably asking why I would have any hesitation to talk about this publicly, given my enthusiasm about it. I have hesitated because there are those who have implied that my reputation in Second Life is at risk if I have any involvement with the magazine. I’ll try and explain a little better, after the jump.

The short version of the story is this. Minnu Palen, who owns the GLAM World sim and Minnu Model Skins, also publishes GLAM World Magazine. Minnu was recently publicly accused of copyright infringement on a certain Second Life fashion/gossip blog. The claim is that Minnu improperly and illegally used files purchased from the Web site Renderosity in the creation of her most recent line of skins. Minnu has responded, stated that she was acting within her rights, and denied any copyright infringement.

(You’ll note that I’m not naming names other than Minnu or linking to any of the blogs involved other than GLAM’s. I have to name GLAM and Minnu if I want this post to make any sense; it isn’t because I only want Minnu’s side of the story heard. Frankly, I’d prefer that neither side have their story heard - I’m really not interested in feeding this controversy any more, but if you absolutely must find out more, Google will get you there.)

That’s it. In an ideal world, this would be handled by the parties involved, or in court, and the rest of us would go on our merry way. But in the echo chamber that is the SL blogosphere, this has erupted into a full-blown flamewar, and has pulled in all sorts of uninvolved parties, each with her own axe to grind and opinion or accusation to share. Drama, drama, drama.

Which brings things back around to me. The GLAM World blog recently announced the release of the latest issue of the magazine, and welcomed the three new staff members joining this month - myself included. Not long afterward, over on the blog that originally published the accusations against Minnu, the blog owner noted the press release and said that those of us named were being pulled in deeper, “reputation-wise.” I took this to imply that by being named as a staff member to the magazine, this person thought that I was risking my reputation in SL.

So, I think you can understand why I hesitated, even temporarily. I don’t like to be threatened, but in a community where reputation is so important, I felt that I needed to assure myself that I wasn’t doing anything that I’d later regret. Especially since the issues involve copyright infringement, which I’ve spoken out on in the past, and which because of my day job I should be expected to know something about.

But in the end, I decided that I wasn’t going to let this controversy prevent me from talking about things I’m doing and that I’m excited about. I do think the world of the magazine and the people who work for it. I was thrilled to join the staff, and I realized I had let this controversy drain that excitement from me. Once I thought about it, I decided that I wasn’t going to allow a few people and their threats to take that enthusiasm away from me, and prevent me from sharing it with my friends.

As for the threat to my reputation, it boils down to guilt by association, which I don’t put any stock in - especially when there’s so tenuous a link between myself and Minnu. There are people screaming about this issue who say they’ll never buy another Minnu product. That seems to me to be reactionary and premature, but so be it. Others have expanded that to include all businesses who have a location in the GLAM World sim. That’s a bit extreme, but again I can see the logical link. But to extend your proclamations and threats to people who work for the magazine, which has nothing to do with the skin texture accusations that have been raised, and its staff, most of whom are writers, is beyond the pale.

Let me say this. I have never met Minnu. I have never bought her skins (they don’t look right on my shape) or any other product she sells. I have no allegiance to her; nor do I have any personal, first-hand knowledge that I could use to pick a side in this controversy. I would have never even known it existed unless I happened to stumble across a blog that was discussing it.

I write about SL fashion because it’s fun for me, because I enjoy learning about it, and because the Residents I get to interact with are interesting and for the most part good people. I think it’s absolutely preposterous to say that I’m risking my reputation by writing articles, just because of who publishes the magazine I’m writing for. The same goes for the entire staff of the magazine, in my opinion. In the end, I decided that I wasn’t going to let myself be hindered by something that, frankly, I have no involvement with and have chosen no side in.

Some people have asked me why, given my day job, I haven’t picked a side in this matter. In fact, it’s because of my familiarity with copyright matters that I’m staying neutral. I know from experience that copyright cases are hardly ever what they appear to be on the surface. Copyright law is incredibly complex, and it’s far more complicated than simply looking at two products and claiming to see some similarities.

I think there’s been an incredible rush to judgment on both sides of this issue. Some people swear they can see all sorts of similarities in the skins, others see no evidence of similarity at all. The fact of the matter is, a layperson’s conclusion on similarity is a very minor part of any copyright claim. In a case involving a specialized field such as this one, the judge would hear testimony from people who are experts in the field comparing the two designs, not from your average blog reader, or even from an intellectual property lawyer. So I’d recommend taking with a grain of salt what’s posted by various fashion bloggers, or their commenting readers, about how they compared the skins and reached this or that conclusion.

The closest we can come to the experts that would be used by a court is the opinion of other SL designers, and as far as I can tell their opinions are decidedly mixed. So, if people who actually know something about the subject can disagree about this, that tells me it's a close case on the copying issue. Furthermore, even if Minnu did use elements of the file, we haven't even reached the legal issues involved, such as whether Minnu had permission under the purchase license, or whether her use is permitted under any number of exceptions to the copyright law.

The best I can do at this point is take no position other than maintaining my status quo relationships until there’s a resolution by the parties involved. Appointing ourselves judge, jury, and executioner when we have neither the knowledge nor the expertise to make any sort of informed conclusion in the matter is irresponsible, given the potential for real harm to the parties involved, both financial and reputational. And for heaven's sake, stop trying to drag other people into the controversy when they’re not involved. Myself, I’m proud of what Genna and I wrote together, and am happy to be able to share it with you all.

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I wanted to give out a big Second Life, First Person welcome to all the folks coming over here from the Daily Kos. Since the article linked to me on the term "Rezbianism," but only pointed you to the main page of my blog, you might be searching for my old post entitled "My Rezbian Theory." Check it out, and I hope you'll be interested enough to explore the blog a bit further. Thanks for visiting!

To my regular readers, just to explain: This morning I was linked to in an article on the Daily Kos website. I highly recommend it - a very interesting and deep exploration of what sexual orientation means, especially when gender becomes a changeable trait, rather than a defined one. Special highlight on the wonderful Zha Ewry in there, too!

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Are you jealous of your Second Self?

That’s the question that a recent post by Dandellion Kimban implores us to ponder as we muddle through this grand experiment in dual identities that is Second Life. The easy answer, for me, is yes - I envy a lot of things about my avatar: her perfect tummy; her hair that’s never messy, and always that perfect shade of mahogany; her ability to stand in heels all day without needing to soak her toes in a footbath for seven hours afterwards.

But those things focus on what being virtual allows our avatar to do or have, and that’s not really what Dande’s getting at. She wants to know if we envy who we are in the metaverse, as compared to who we are IRL. It’s a difficult question for me, and one I’ll try to wade into after the jump.

As I see it, there are a few ways that I could potentially be jealous of the avatar who is Kit Meredith. The first is that I could be jealous of the social life that she has - the myriad friends she chats with; the wonderful partner who is also her best friend; the exciting, fun, and sometimes glamorous events she attends. This is the sort of thing that Dande’s friend is complaining to her about in the email she excerpts on her blog - that the avatar has a better social life than the driver.

I’ll confess that I’ve felt this way myself. There’s no doubt that my social life IRL has changed mightily since I had children. I forego happy hour after work to rush home to see my girls, and I stay in most nights because a babysitter is expensive and a pain. In many ways, logging into SL is the easiest way for me to leave the house these days after the kids go to bed. And yes, there’s sometimes a twinge of jealousy when I realize that I don’t keep up with my RL friends network like I used to, while at the same time my Friends list grows by the day, filled with fascinating people.

But as I think about it, I realize that this is really a false distinction, and there’s no reason for me to be jealous. The friends that I have ISL, they’re my friends. Lanna is my partner, and she’s enriched my life beyond any borders between the virtual and the atomic worlds. And when I go to a party ISL, it’s me that’s getting to go and have fun. So there’s actually no reason I should feel jealous, because it’s not like Kit is leaving me at home on the couch when she goes to a party. I get to experience all the fun and emotions that come with her social life. So when I find myself feeling this jealousy, I’m always able to talk myself out of it.

The second way I find myself getting jealous of Kit is in her burgeoning notoriety. As my post last week alluded to, in a number of ways Kit Meredith is already better known than my RL persona. While I certainly don’t aspire to fame or SLebrity, I won’t deny that it feels neat to be recognized, or when people who I’ve never met tell me they read the blog. My RL persona is far from unknown in certain circles, but there’s no way that I’ll ever be known in the way that I could be ISL.

And there, again, the twinges of jealousy start. And, again, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s a false distinction. When Kit writes something on the blog that people read and like, it’s MY words. While people who know me may not know my RL name, they know me nonetheless.

But there’s a third way I find myself getting jealous of Kit, that isn’t explained away so easily. Sometimes I find myself getting jealous of Kit’s personality. My personality ISL is in many ways exactly like my RL one. But there are also some differences that I’ve started to see. I’m still struggling to define them exactly, but suffice it to say that my SL self is more positive, more carefree, and more open than my RL self, who can be cynical and suspicious. I have an edge to my personality IRL that I think most people ISL would be shocked to see.

Yes, there are those who will tell you that their personalities are different between RL and SL for one simple reason: they are completely different people in each Life. I’m not in that camp - I am the same person, though I may project myself differently when I’m in SL. But that raises a completely different question - if I find myself being jealous of who I am ISL, why can’t I just try and be more like that IRL?

It’s the conundrum Dande is referring to when she writes:

You know, our avatars are maybe not the best of us, but certainly are the parts of us that we love very much. Some of those parts we were aware of, some we had to discover during our second lives. . . . I am not going to raise the question why our humans haven't developed our avatar's personalities in the meatspace. Sure some things that avatars do are not possible in the meatspace, but what we are talking here is something more essential and, therefore, available in the first life. Our humans can talk and act like our avatars do. Right? So? Why that avie is not going out in the meatspace then?

Well, I think that’s exactly the question, Dande, and you may not raise it but I will. It’s something Lanna has asked me on numerous occasions - if I like the qualities that are emphasized in my SL persona, why can’t I try and express them more IRL? I don’t think I’ve ever given her a sufficient answer, but I’ll try again here.

In a lot of ways, my edge appears IRL more than it does ISL because I need it IRL, and I make sure that I don’t ISL. My job requires me to be hard-edged, cynical, analytical - and I don’t deny that I enjoy that part of being a lawyer. But at the end of the day, I’m tired of it and want to be at peace. So I choose to put myself in as drama-free of an environment ISL as I can. And in that environment, it’s a lot easier to be open with my feelings and positive.

There’s also a self-selection element to it - I can choose when I want to be ISL, and if I’ve had an awful day and know I’m going to be a nasty you-know-what to everyone around me, I simply won’t log in. I’ll go to bed instead, or spend my time elsewhere. Those who are around me IRL have to be around me no matter what, so they end up getting the bad side that most of my SL friends never see.

And finally, I think that there’s a difference between how I express myself ISL, that makes me come across as more agreeable and less hard-edged, that has nothing to do with me. It’s the interface. There’s something about typing, that puts an additional step - an additional filter - between thought and word. It allows me to make sure I express myself exactly how I want, and it no doubt lets me remove some of the things that I’d rather not express.

Zha Ewry wrote about a corollary to this on her blog recently in a post called “Congruence - Words and Actions.” She notes:

In a mostly text world, with avatars which type what we tell them to, and blush, smile, and frown, on cue, the listener, is at the mercy of the speaker for body language, which can be misleading, either due to self deception, or actual intent to deceive.

While I’ll give this a more charitable view that Zha does - I don’t think it’s necessarily misleading to make your avatar use body language that isn’t exactly like the body language I’d use IRL - her point is worth noting. Anyone who has spent any time chatting with me knows that I use emotes like a fiend, but they’re almost always to express something positive. Kit nods at people I agree with, Kit laughs at things I find funny. But Kit doesn’t ever shake her head, grimace, or smirk, even though I might be doing the same thing IRL.

What all this adds up to is a personality for Kit that is me, but a more positive, idealistic me, and I sometimes find myself jealous of those qualities. Would I be more like Kit IRL if I could? Possibly, but it’s beside the point, because I’m how I am for a reason. I like myself in both Lives, and I’m happy to be exploring both facets of “me.”

What about you? Are you jealous of your avatar?

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Two quick blog-related notes. First, my post yesterday about Googling your Second Life name and comparing to your legal name (or, as Vidal Tripsa fetchingly put it, the “Kit Meredith Challenge”) was SLFP’s 100th post! I know it’s not that big a deal, and surely there are blogs that update way more frequently that have reached 100 posts a lot sooner than I did. But still, it’s nice to note, it helps me feel just a little more established in the blogosphere. Special thanks to Hamlet Au for linking to the post from NWN, it adds to the happy happy joy joy.

Second, for those of you who keep up with the blog using a feedreader (FeedBurner tells me there’s about 90 of you - yikes!), you’ve no doubt noticed that I’ve switched back to partial post format in my feed. It’s a temporary measure, and while the story is a long one, it basically is due to the fact that I’m using a nifty new widget that Blogger Buster tipped me off to, run by a service called aideRSS, and I'm trying to get it to recognize older posts. (You can find the widget - pictured at left - at the bottom of the page in the rightmost footer section.)

What aideRSS basically does is sort your blog’s feed by “popularity,” measured by the number of comments, Google links, Diggs, and del.icio.us tags the post has gotten. One way you can use it is to then take those ranks and put them in a widget that displays the top ten most popular posts, like I have done.

But you can also use it for blogs that are not your own. Tired of sorting through every new post published on the Fashion Planet Feed? You can run it through aideRSS, which will then provide you with what I’d call “sub-feeds” - RSS feeds that include only the top 50% or even 10% of the posts on the feed. It’s an interesting idea for those of us who have a hard time keeping up with the flood of RSS feeds we’re subscribed to, but don’t want to drop any of the sites we follow.

Anyway, hope you find the widget useful, and I promise that I’ll switch my feed back to full format very soon. Have a great weekend, everybody!

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I know it’s an incredibly vain exercise, but do you ever Google yourself? I don’t mean searching for your legal, real life name - that’s been part of the pop culture for years now. I mean Googling your Second Life avatar's name. I had the strangest experience the other day when I Googled “Kit Meredith” and shockingly found that my SL identity returns more results than my RL one.

I guess I shouldn’t be terribly surprised by this - after all, our SL identities only exist in the virtual, online sense. And unless we use Skype or have RL contact with other Residents, the only way for us to maintain our community when we’re not in-world is through our online presences. Actually, I bet this goes a long way toward explaining why it seems like every other SL resident has a blog, and why we’re taking over social networking sites such as Flickr and thesixtyone.

Anyway, as of today, a Google search for “Kit Meredith” returns 2,250 hits. My RL name... less than that. And here I was thinking that I was pretty Googleable as my RL self. In an age of Google Fights in which Googleability is often equated with popularity or reknown, should I feel strange that I’ve been able to eclipse in six months in SL what it’s taken me over three decades to achieve in RL?

What do you get when you Google me? Details after the jump.

Now, granted, at least some of those 2,250 results that Google returns on “Kit Meredith” are not “me.” There’s always some juxtaposition of the terms by accident, like the “Batman Activity Kit (Meredith Books).” There’s also apparently a few people named Kit Meredith in RL, though their hits are rare and pretty far down the list.

Interestingly, there are two Kit Merediths who are characters in novels... and they’re both male. Kit Meredith is some sort of shapeshifter who practices “wild magic” in “Murder Entailed” by Susan Krinard. He’s also a wealthy heir to an estate in the romance novel “Poor Caroline” by Elizabeth Mansfield.

But the rest of the hits are me, and for the most part they’re the virtual bread crumbs of my online travels - comments I’ve left places, links from people’s blogrolls, mentions of me on other people’s blogs. Makes me realize just how much time I spend browsing the blogosphere!

The really interesting results are the ones where you find your name being dropped in discussions that you’re not a part of - sort of like eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation and finding out you’re being talked about. Fortunately, in the ones I’ve turned up, people are saying nice things! For example, in the comments to a blog post on your2ndplace.com, Alan Bamboo calls me his “favorite blogger of all time.” Awww... now I’m blushing.

And I had to laugh when my search turned up a Tweet by Jacek Antonelli asking “Is Kit Meredith on Twitter?” No, Jacek, I’m not, Twitter terrifies me because I already waste enough time during the workday (see paragraph above about browsing the blogosphere). But now that I know I’m being asked for by name, maybe I’ll try it out. Wait, what am I saying? No! I must resist!

What about you? Do you ever Google your SL name? Who would win in a Google Fight between your SL name and your RL one?

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Though I’d never tried out blogging before I became active in Second Life, I always had the hunch that I’d enjoy it. After all, writing is the basis for my day job (television portrayals aside, most attorneys spend more time writing than they do on their feet in court), and it just seemed logical that I’d enjoy writing on a blog. What I never expected was that I’d spend nearly as much time on the visual side of blogging as I do actually writing.

While you can certainly publish a blog that has little to no visual content, I believe that a key to having a successful site is presenting the reader with visuals that complement whatever it is that you’re writing about. That’s why I spent so long on my site redesign back in January, and why I rarely publish a post without at least one image. Blogging at Linden Lifestyles has just reinforced my emphasis on visual content, given that a core element of each post over there is the photos of whatever products we’re reviewing.

What this means is that I spend a lot more time in SL these days taking snapshots than I ever thought I would. Good thing I really enjoy doing it - in RL I’ve always been a bit of an amateur photographer, though I do it more as a chronicler of vacations and life events than I do it for the art of the photograph. But SL has taken things to another level for me, just because there’s always something amazing to try and capture with a snapshot, and because the platform really lends itself to some stunning imagery, especially after the introduction of WindLight. Plus, in SL you never have to worry about not having your camera in your purse when you run across something that you really want to take a picture of.

Which brings me back around to answering the question I know is on the minds of most of my readers right now: “Why in the name of Phillip Linden is there a picture of Kit nekkid next to this post?” Well, it got your attention, didn’t it? Plus, I’m hoping to get paid - explanation (and more nakedness) after the jump.

I’ll bet that if you were to go back over the archives of my blog (go on, do it, I’ll wait...) or even look at my Picasa albums of in-world photography and studio pictures, you’d see that my skill in taking SL photos has definitely increased. But it’s been a struggle. The introduction of WindLight vastly complicated things, especially on the lighting front. I’ve had to learn a lot about local lighting and the WindLight presets in order to get to where my results are more like this, rather than this or this.

But I’ve also been extremely grateful for the customization that WindLight has permitted me, both in terms of lighting and atmospherics. It’s a blessing and a curse to be able to tweak every little thing about the environment like WindLight permits - I can’t tell you how much time I spend just moving the sun around the sky, trying to get things lit just right. Could you imagine having that power for RL photography? I’d be a danger to myself and others.

Recently I found out that the website Koinup (sort of a Flickr and YouTube for virtual worlds) was having a WindLight photography contest, and I knew that I really wanted to enter. Yes, the prize is really nice, but I honestly don’t have any expectation of winning - I just saw what great stuff the other entrants were submitting, and I wanted to challenge myself to do something similar, to really put my WindLight skills to the test.

The contest rules allow you to submit two SL photos, which will be judged by a team made up of Vint Falken and the Linden brothers (Pastrami and Torley). The challenge of the competition is to “focus on the potential of Windlight.” Obviously, for me, that potential is to get naked and sit in black water:

To me, the appeal of WindLight has mostly been its added realism - I’m still stunned with how the light plays off the ripples in the water so perfectly, and the sunsets... well, we all know how I feel about those. But for this competition, I thought I’d focus on a different aspect of the potential of WindLight, namely the way it permits surreality just as easily as it improves reality. This comes mostly from the ability to customize the sky and water with whatever colors and conditions you want. For the photograph above, I went to the Chouchou sim, which is already very surreal on its own, and then made the water and sky black and the clouds red. (Full disclosure, I used Torley’s WL preset “CastleVain” for the sky with some modest tweaks, and the preset “Valdez” for the water.) Oh, and I stripped off all my clothes and sat down. It’s not being naked, it’s being nude. Because it’s art!


This is my second submission - you can see both in larger formats by clicking on them, which will take you over to the photo page at Koinup. (You can also check out my Picasa album where the other shots that I didn’t submit are posted.) I wanted somewhere I could use a pink sky and green water, as a complete pander to Torley’s watermelon tendencies. Just kidding. I was flying around the Rezzable sims looking for good scenery to photograph (being Rezzable, it’s a target-rich environment) when I ran across this oil rig in the middle of the water.

I selected this as a subject for two reasons - first, the best features of WindLight really come out in shots with lots of water and sky, and the setting has lots of both surround a very evocative build in the oil rig. Second, I had really wanted to do something with a “toxic” theme, with greenish water and a very radically colored sky. I thought an oil rig was the perfect setting for something toxic. Again, I used mildly tweaked versions of Torley’s WL presets for these - “Chernobyl” for the sky, and “Listeryne” for the water.

I don’t think that you really need much postprocessing with these shots, especially since the idea is to show off what WindLight can do on its own. I did adjust the contrast on both pics a little, and added the transparent frames, but that’s really it. I hope people like these, I certainly enjoyed putting them together.

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