Quite a few new bits and pieces coming up in the near future – I’ve been pretty busy inworld, and pretty busy in RL too, which has caused a bit of a backlog with new releases, but I’m getting there slowly!
And, here’s the first 2 new kids on the block in my range of illuminated displays/billboards. This time, I’ve gone for a multi-panel design, with 11 futuristic, cycling images which change every 30 seconds. Click the handy control switchbox on the support girder, for a resizing HUD, giving the flexibility to use these in a variety of situations, ranging from small internal displays to giant outdoor billboards.
Best of all, these come in 2 different flavours – standard, ideal for any urban, futuristic or cyberpunk setting, or a fun broken version, complete with dodgy flickering, a dirty weather-streaked face, classic Kilroy grafitti tag and a smashed, wrecked panel dangling precariously from its connecting wires. Perfect for grungy, dystopian and post-apocalyptic environments.
Grab them on Marketplace today, and keep an eye open for lots of new items, coming soon!
Let’s steer clear of dictionary definitions, which tend to be somewhat clinical and literal, because over time the term has become a lot more nuanced and a lot more subjective.
Much depends – as is the case with preferred learning styles – on how we relate to situations: Some of us prefer visual stimulation, for others it can be the stimulus from other senses – sound, smell, touch. Whilst, for many, it’s very much a case of mood and environment, for example, what may seem incredibly sexy in a candlelit room, alone with a special someone, a bottle of wine, and romantic music, may not feel at all sexy in a crowded supermarket with someone you barely know. Or, vice versa – there’s no accounting for tastes! Even if a scenario ticks all the boxes for you, the mood can instantly be ruined by a bad headache, a screaming kid, uninvited guest or loud and smelly fart!
Sexy isn’t just about sex either. A car can be sexy, a song can be sexy, so too can a voice, a dance or designer kitchen cabinets! It’s all about context and personal appeal in much the same way that exactly the same photograph in black and white, with soft focus might be considered arty, erotic and sexy, but in full colour, and posted on a website, it might be considered tacky, exploitative and pornographic – and, ironically, by some – sexy!
The point I’m trying to make is that ‘sexy’ is very much in the eye of the beholder, and whilst there may be certain societal conventions that broadly encompass various definitions of the word, it’s really not for others to tell me what is, or is not, sexy, although advertising agencies, in particular, don’t seem to have got that message. Neither, it seems, have SL content creators.
I’m a member of several inworld groups for stores and events that routinely send out advertisements, shopping HUDs and event notices, and not a day goes by – sometimes, not even an hour goes by – without me receiving numerous invitations to buy, visit or try new creations, and it would be fair to say that a good 85% or more of those items – whatever they might be – have a description or title preceded by the word ‘sexy’.
I could understand if everyone was trying to sell me lingerie, but that’s simply not the case, and I’ve been known to sigh audibly on receipt of an advert for ‘Sexy brown coat’, ‘Sexy jumpsuit’, ‘Sexy Easter bunny costume’, ‘Sexy pirate’, ‘Sexy Kawaii Shopping Event’ – seriously, that last one doesn’t even make sense! It irritates me immensely, firstly because it’s just lazy: whatever happened to descriptive titles? Partly, it’s because in many cases it’s just appended to an item by way of some sort of bizarre thought process that has concluded ‘sexy sells’, no matter what the item in question. On that basis, maybe I should rename my cyber radioactive waste bin, ‘Sexy cyber radioactive waste bin’, and watch sales go through the roof? Mainly though, it because it seems the majority of creators, sellers, event-hosters and – presumably – buyers, are of the opinion that the definition of sexy in SL is ‘partially clothed’.
Perhaps I should say ‘barely’ rather than ‘partially, since current fashion trends seem to dictate that dresses should expose vastly more flesh than they obscure, underwear should be at least 4 sizes too small than required to adequately fulfil the role for which underwear is intended, and pretty much any item of clothing, whatever its purpose, should be mostly transparent, cut too short where it should be long, too narrow where it should be wide, and either way too tight or way too loose to serve any practical purpose, other than to expose whatever it’s supposed to be covering. The same would seem to apply to both female and male clothing.
Now, I’m no prude, but there ain’t no way I’ll be wearing any of that tat to go exploring the virtual world. Although, judging from many of the avatars I see around me, that’s not a concern shared by everyone – either that, or faced by the lack of any real variety in clothing available for their very expensive and oddly-shaped mesh body, the only other option is to wear a sack.
I can however draw some positivity from the current state of sartorial affairs: it’s drastically cut down on the amount of notices and ads that I feel any need to open, read or look at. I now know that if anything pops up in the corner of my screen and is described as ‘sexy’, I can happily delete it without looking, since it will contain absolutely nothing that I’ll have any interest in whatsoever. Great news for me, but if only a small percentage of those receiving these notices come to the same conclusion that I have, it’s not such great news for those reliant on such things to promote their brands and make sales, if a bunch of potential customers are just going to bin notices without opening.
I’ve written ad nauseum about the state of the SL rag trade, and how inworld clothing has become horribly predictable, severely limited in variety and utterly lacking in taste. I’m not going to go over it again because, until we get some seriously enlightened mesh designers who are more interested in the potential of fashion rather than just raking in the lindens, and until people stop buying the trash that they’re being saddled with in protest, nothing is going to change. Besides, I’m boring myself by getting up on the same old soap box, yet again, so I must be boring you too!
Maybe I’ll come up with some topics that are more wholesome and edifying in the future, but then again, this is SL…
Flower power is back! Well, why not? For all those of you old enough to have nostalgic memories of the days of free love, new age travelers and dancing around fields with flowers in your hair, and indeed, all those of you who profess to be far too young to remember such things, but nevertheless feel drawn to those happier times, this for you.
I’ve been experimenting and trying out some new techniques, and the end result is 9, brand new pieces of hippie-dippy-trippy psychadelic wall decor. These chunky, glossy animated pieces perfectly capture the mood of the day, and you can see them in action here!
Ihave a mental picture of how technical developer meetings take place at Linden Lab: It’s Tuesday morning, everyone’s had their first Choco-machiatto-frappucino soy frappe latte of the day and are ready to face whatever comes their way. Scrum time…
Techieboss Linden:OK everyone, we’re going to develop a new setting that inverts an avatar’s screen if they invade a furry’s personal space. Assembled Moles and devs:Yay! Great idea! Techieboss Linden:Awesome. That’s decided then, everyone get to work.
And no-one, but no-one, ever thinks (or dares) to put their tentative hand up and say, “Er, boss… shouldn’t we consider how this is going to effect other people first? I know it’s a fabulous idea, and allthat, but that doesn’t mean we should just go ahead and do it, right?” At which point, no doubt, they’d be summarily fired and perma-banned from SL.
However, this is an absolutely necessary step in developing any service or product to ensure that whatever changes you’re are going to make are properly thought-out, and that any potential negative outcome for anyone who might be affected by any changes is properly understood and mitigation is in place to accomodate this. In the real world, we call this a Change Impact Assessment, (which must be awfully confusing if you work as a change agent for the CIA!), and it’s an important step in ensuring that any ‘improvements’ you make don’t cause a headache for a large proportion of your users, whilst benefitting just a few.
This is not a concept that Linden Lab seem too familiar with, since they have a history of rolling out ‘improvements’ to SL that are, at best dubious, and at their worst manage to upset a massive chunk of the SL populace. The infamous removal of last names is a classic example of this, and the shabby, money-grabbing ‘solution’ to the problem – a problem that the Lab had brought upon themselves, only generated further alienation and anger amongst a large proportion of users. All of which could easily have been avoided if only someone had the guts to suggest they think things through before deploying a predictably hugely unpopular change. Similarly, did no-one ever question the logic behind adding a billion LI premium to animesh, causing what could be a great asset to the virtual world to be hardly ever used? These are perfect illustrations of the 2nd Amendment to Seren’s 9th Law of SL: ‘When Linden Lab ‘fixes’ something, it will break several other things that worked previously’
The problem lies with the slapdash way that development of SL, for some reason, sits mainly with the tech whizzkids and geeks. Now, I’ve nothing against geeks – I’m a geek myself – but when it comes to developing a product, you really need to involve real, non-geek, people to ask the show-stopping questions that prevent cock-ups from occurring, because geeks exist on a whole different level of consciousness, where the questions that real people ask are completely alien and unintelligible, just as the reverse is also true. If you don’t believe me, find a great scripter inworld and ask them a question about marketing, or ask them to show you all those amazing scripts they’ve written for things that nobody has ever needed a script for. Before introducing any new change or feature, we need a non-Geek, non-techie someone to call a halt, someone who is going to ask questions like:
Why are you making this enhancement so complicated that only a rocket surgeon or brain scientist will be able to understand how to use it?
Why are you making a change that literally nobody has ever asked for, or wants?
Have you actually run this past any average resident, content creators or landowners?
No, seriously, why are you making this so damn complicated?
Is this a vanity project, or something that really needs to be done?
Is this going to cause problems for a bunch of users that you haven’t even thought about considering?
Is it more important than fixing sim crossings and group chat?
It’s questions like this that never seem to get asked, but really should be.
Let’s take PBR – a topic I’ve previously geekily covered at length – it’s a real thing now (at least in the official viewer), but it’s still all a bit piecemeal and not particularly great for the average user to get their head around, and it has its problems still; but for me, the real issue is that creating PBR-enabled objects, and setting up the associated reflection probes and whatnot is something that the majority of inworld creators are simply going to find to be too much of a learning curve, and too great a hassle to bother with. This will lead to a couple of very predictable outcomes… To begin with, only those creators with a lot of time, money, the necessary (very expensive) software and – most likely – a professional 3D design degree and/or team of designers, are going to be in the arena for making decent creations that employ PBR, taking it beyond the reach of casual creators, like – for example – myself. Ever wondered why the Lab dropped the ‘Your imagination… Your world’ tagline? It’s because SL is now turning into a world where it’s the (lack of) imagination of those select few who are able to produce items using advanced content creation tools and techniques that is dictating how the virtual world now looks. Yep, geeks again, and what do geeks know about fashion and interior design? It’s bad enough that ‘normality’ in SL has become running around partially-clothed, with one enormous boob flopping about uncovered, whilst sporting a butt that most horses would consider ‘ample’, because that’s how the very few designers that hold all the power think we should look; just wait until every building, item of furniture and piece of decor is being produced by just half a dozen creators and the lack of choice and individuality that will bring? For me, it hardly bears thinking about.
The second thing that will happen is that vanishingly small pool of creators will start dictatating exactly what the post PBR world should look like, in exactly the same way that the small pool of mesh clothing and body creators now dictates what everybody looks like and wears – because nobody else is able to make decent-looking clothes any more, thanks to the complexity of creating original rigged mesh. Finally – because it’s badly-implemented – PBR will be under-utilised and the exception, rather than the rule, just like animesh, pathfinding and EEP… Nobody uses them, they don’t know how to. And this is the real reason why, my friends, we can’t have nice things!
However, that is not what I wish to moan about today (yeah, I know – I failed on that count!), although it should serve to illustrate why I think the Lab’s workflow is fundamentally borked. What I do wish to throw into the spotlight does however arise out of the foregoing mess, and it is what the Lab (presumably to curry favour) has inaccurately described as ‘Increased Land Impact Allowance’ – it’s not an increase to LI allowance, it’s a 15% reduction of mesh download impact, which – as I’ll explain shortly – is an important disctinction.
Whoopee! I hear you all cry; more prims for free! Well, yes in a manner of speaking, but really it’s the same number of prims, but your mesh has less impact on it. So, big deal, what’s the problem with that?
The problem, is that nobody thought to ask content creators if reducing the download impact for mesh was the best way to go about this. It’s a problem because now the land impact stated for every mesh item on Marketplace will be wrong, every advertisement and every vendor in every store will have the wrong LI displayed, and all of the work that creators do ‘behind the scenes’ to keep a record of and manage the impact of their meshes will now have to be revised and updated, requiring everything we’ve created to be rezzed and checked. It may seem a small point to anyone who’s never made, sold, or marketed a piece of mesh, but it’s a heck of a lot of needless and time-consuming, frustrating work to put right something that if anyone had thought to mention to a content creator or two what they intended doing and asked whether it was a good idea, would never have got off the ground in the first place!
It’s just typical of how the Lab thinks: ‘How can we make a change in the most obscure, arcane way possible, without consulting with the end users?’ It’s bonkers.
Why they couldn’t just increase the land LI allowance by 15% beats me, especially when you consider that estate tools already have, and have always had, the functionality to include a land impact multiplication factor, built in.
What will really happen though is that nobody will bother to change anything, so in the future you’ll never know how much any mesh item is going to cost you in terms of land impact. That, coupled with the undemocratisation of creativity I mentioned earlier, is a recipe for a virtual world that will steadily become infinitely more boring, uniform and lack any sense of self-expression and individuality.
What a shambles.
And, trust me, it won’t be the last thing the Lindens mess up as a result of being so disconnected from their users. I can’t wait to see what they do next!
No, really – bollards: the darling of town planners and architects the world over. The humble bollard directs traffic, prevents unauthorised access, guides pedestrians and generally gets in the way of anyone trying to go about their daily business. Not bad for a plain old lump of concrete or metal!
And our cities of the future will certainly need them too, which is where the Neon Dreamz cyber bollard comes into its own. These HUD-controlled city essentials will bring a touch of class to any cyberpunk, or urban neighborhood, or even find a use in space stations and anywhere else you need to create order from chaos. The HUD makes customisation a cinch – with separate controls for light colour, luminance and glow, along with 6 different textures to choose from: metallic, cotswold stone, sandstone, concrete, dark and light scifi themes. Copiable, so you can use as many as you need, in as many variations you fancy. Available on Marketplace now, for only L$250.
This is a message primarily to Marketplace sellers, although if anyone from the Lab is listening in – it wouldn’t do any harm if you took note as well. And the message is a simple one… Stop it! Right now!
It’s annoying, it’s sneaky, it’s unhelpful, it’s offputting to customers and it’s harming your business. And, once you’ve stopped it, go back to your listings and remove all the offending items!
What am I talking about? The various devious methods that sellers use to force their demo items into the spotlight, deliberately subverting the Marketplace search criteria and thereby forcing potential customers to wade through masses of meaningless, unwanted results, wasting time and getting endlessly frustrated in the process.
What sort of logic is followed by content creators who deliberately go out of their way to alienate customers who have specifically opted to exclude demo items from their search criteria – and who have checked the box expressly provided for that purpose – yet are still faced with a screen full of demos, when the results appear… or worse, only find out an item is just a demo on opening its listing? It makes no sense to me at all. What is so difficult to understand that when someone checks a box saying ‘Do not show demo items’, they really don’t want to see demo items?
Imagine ordering a pizza and clearly specifying on your order ‘No anchovies’ and you open the box to find your lunch completely smothered in anchovies! Is that good customer service? Does it make you want to order from that pizza parlour again? Are you going to give them a 5-star review? No, of course not, and whether it’s pizza from the local takeaway, or searching for a pair of boots on MP, if there’s something you’ve asked to exclude that persists in rearing its ugly head anyway, you are going to be an unhappy customer.
No anchovies, and definitely no octopus!
Despite which, MP merchants are determined to find ever more devious ways to ram their demos down customers’ throats, no matter what the preference expressed. Whether it’s taking advantage of MP’s ropy search functionality by wrapping the word ‘demo’ in other characters… /DEMO/, *demo*, -demo, and so on; slipping naughty threes and zeroes where they aren’t warranted… D3MO, DEM0; or the downright blatant avoidance of search filters entirely by sticking the word ‘demo’ on the image, rather than in the item name. Finally, having negotiated the full gamut of these sneaky descriptors, the poor consumer is often then misled into clicking on to a bargain, only to find that what they thought was a great deal, is actually not what it seems, thanks to the indication that it’s only a demo item being buried somewhere deep in the small print of the item description.
There’s no excuse for it. It’s a deliberate ploy by sellers to mislead potential purchasers. Now, I can hear the howls of protest at that statement, but I’m right. No matter how clearly ‘demo’ is shown in the search results, the fact is that these items shouldn’t be showing in those results at all, and it’s not because MP search is rubbish, it’s because the seller has deliberately chosen to list the item, rather than set it as a demo when creating the listing.
Perhaps, it would assist if we were to ponder a moment about why customers might specifically want to exclude demos from their searches, and why it’s so irritating when it doesn’t work:
Bargain hunters: Many people rely on Marketplace as their first port of call when it comes to finding freebies and cheap items. It’s quicker, easier and less hassle than trying to find them inworld, especially when so many find themselves frequently in the position of needing to quickly cobble together outfits, last-minute, and cheaply, as costumes for events. Nobody wants to be spending a fortune every other day on new outfits for superhero-themed events, ‘best in leather’ competitions, or ‘dress as a pot plant’ contests. That can get very expensive, very quickly, and MP can be a lifesaver when it comes to throwing together a cheap and cheerful, single-use outfit, without breaking the bank. Then, of course, there are those who love a bargain or a freebie, or who are simply on a limited budget. So, searching for these sort of things can be immensely frustrating when half of the results that come up are demos, particularly if you’re in a hurry or are trying to stick to spending limits – you just want to see what you’re looking for, not a whole pile of stuff you’ve absolutely no interest in!
Shoppers on a mission: These are people with a specific item in mind. They don’t want to be sidetracked with irrelevant results, and they don’t want to waste time trying to find exactly what they’re looking for. They are people who tire rapidly of wading through pages of demo items, particularly when they’ve already indicated they’ve no interest in them in the first place. Shoppers on a mission come to Marketplace because it should be easier to find what they want, and far quicker than hunting around in multiple locations inworld. They certainly don’t want to face a mass of irrelevant search results thanks to inconsiderate sellers trying to hype their merchandise.
I struggle to understand why sellers think this is a legitimate practice that shoppers will appreciate. By all means, get your samples and demos out there, and I’m sure that will generate passing trade – people find it far easier to part with their cash if they see something they fancy and can try before they buy. However, don’t lumber us with unnecessary search results that we’ve specifically said we don’t want to see, because that’s almost certainly going to lose you precious sales. Worse still, dumping mislabled, incorrectly categorised items all over Marketplace is just going to clog the system up, leading to frustration and increasingly innacurate search results. It annoys me that purchasers and sellers alike complain bitterly how badly MP search is broken, but there’s actually not all that much wrong with the system: It’s the merchants manipulating search terms, or listing items under completely innacurate key words that’s really making a mess of it.
Let me give you an example, by way of illustration. I searched Marketplace for ‘Denim jacket’, specifying no demos. Of the 96 items that came up on the first page of results, over half were totally unconnected with either denim or jackets, and more than 20 results were for demos, every one of them the results of incorrect use of key words, or sellers subverting the system to push their demos, at the expense of search accuracy. It sucks, and it could all be so easily fixed, if only sellers on Marketplace were prepared to play fair and treat their customers, and the system, with a bit of respect.
Not a denim jacket in sight!
There’s no need at all for Marketplace search to be so broken, but it’s nothing to do with the search engine, or – for once – the Labbies not doing a great job. It’s purely the fault of indisciplined sellers trying to bend and break the rules for their own benefit.
So, if that’s you, I’ll say it again, just stop it!
Because, you can bet your bottom Linden Dollar, not just me, but lots of other potential customers are going to stop it too… that is, we’ll stop buying your goods and stick with sellers who don’t mess us around instead.
s. x
I have spoke with the tongue of angels I have held the hand of a devil It was warm in the night I was cold as a stone But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for U2 – I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
Club equipment is one area I’m interested in experimenting with more. With the music, dancing and demanding tips with menaces simply for saying hello hosting scene so big inworld, I figure there must be a market for it, right? Worth a shot anyway. Indeed, if you check out my Marketplace store and search for ‘club’, you’ll find a few items there already which can also be seen inworld at the HHI store, but it’s high time I expanded the range!
These cool (well, I think so) inline displays are great for DJs and club owners alike, plus I reckon they’d look good on anyone’s wall just as decor. They’re available in 3 flavours: ‘Club’, ‘EQ’ and ‘Dual’ – the Club and EQ versions can be resized with the built-in menu, and also have a display options menu, they’re also available in a twin pack at a discount. The Dual version combines both Club and EQ options in a single unit. All are copiable, so you can have several on display, all with different screens! I reckon that’s value for money 😉
Pick them up on Marketplace – just search ‘inline’ or click on the images below to go straight there!
As a general rule, I’m not prone to making silly mistakes, either in real life, or when it comes to SL. However, this week I’ve had a couple of brain farts, which have left me looking rather silly and which have served as reminders that even the best of us are susceptible to doing daft things.
I suppose we’ve all suffered from embarrassing faux pas inworld. Who hasn’t accidentally ended up removing all their clothes in the middle of a crowded location, logged in to somebody else’s house rather than our own by mistake, or blurted out something in local chat that was supposed to be a private message to a friend? Yep, guilty as charged, as I’m sure you are too – it happens, and most of the time, we have a good laugh about it, after the initial cringeworthiness, and get on with our SLife. There are, of course, occasions when a slip of the tongue, mouse, or brain can have other, less amusing, consequences. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does I think all we can do is apologise, make the best of a bad deal, and make sure we don’t do something similar again.
Then there are the weird and wonderful things that can trip us up inworld that you just don’t expect or plan for, and when that happens, I guess you just have to shrug and learn from it. That’s what happened, a couple of times to me this week.
First of all, there was the unintentional mouse double-click that triggered nearly 2 hours of angst. At the time, I’d intended to take my boots off, but somehow I ended up double-clicking in completely the wrong place in my inventory. So, instead of removing my shoes, I ended up wearing shoes. All of them… including all the different sizes, shapes, alphas and foot shapers, along with all of their associated HUDs, unpackers, group joiners and other nonsense that dwells within those particular folders.
The first I knew something was up was when my viewer ground to a complete halt and then everything started to happen in extreme slow motion. My screen became plastered with a multitude of HUDs, I found myself clutching numerous bags and boxes, and my feet sported a bewildering array of foot attire. Pretty, it was not!
‘Never mind’, I reasoned, ‘Once I hit the maximum number of attachments, it’ll all stop, I can take it all off, and everything will be fine’. Fat chance of that! 106 items later (38 attachments and 64 BOM layers), I clicked detach, and away they went. Then the next batch of 106 started rezzing… rinse and repeat, time after time, after time. And, it was a very long time indeed. Eventually, things seemed to come to a natural halt, only by now I was grey and things were quite definitely not how they should be, so I logged off, and then I logged back on.
And it all started happening again!
Thankfully, this time it didn’t take too long, but at the end of it I’d learned a valuable lesson: always double-check your double-clicks, and never intentionally wear a folder containing 4000+ items, or you’ll spend an awful lot of time regretting that you did.
I did feel foolish, but it was genuinely an accident, unlike my next bit of nonsense, which was completely down to my impatience!
It was one of those ‘click to get a gift’ boards, and it was something I really wanted – alright, the picture on the board hadn’t rezzed yet, but that wasn’t going to stop me, so I clicked it. Nothing. I clicked again… ‘Sorry, you’ve already claimed the gift for this month’. And then, the texture rezzed: ‘Coming soon!’
Nooooooo!
But, yes – I’d blown it, and all because I wasn’t prepared to wait a few seconds to make completely sure of what I was clicking on. Another lesson learned the hard way, but once again, it was all down to my itchy mouse finger! Is there a cure for that? Do they make mice for those clickerly-challenged? Should I just disconnect my mouse altogether? Then again, I’m only human; perhaps I should put it down to experience, take a deep breath, and accept that sometimes SL just does things you don’t want it to do.
Which really, is all part of the fun, right?
s. x
You know Merve, you’re not the only one that’s dumb Who else is dumb? Everybody You’re right, they’re all dumb Psychostick – The Dumb Song
Following hard on the heels of yesterday’s post, I’ve no idea why I never thought to do this before, it’s a no-brainer really! Maybe that explains it – lack of brains – well, at least I’ll have nothing to worry about come the zombie apocalypse!
This one’s for all the cyberpunks, and will go equally well in a club or city setting too – anywhere you fancy putting it, really! It comes complete with a resizing HUD, and the word ‘punk’ flickers in a most satisfying way… like your underground chip fat fuelled generator is stuttering and needs a good kick.
It’s only L$175, so why not grab one now and make your cyber space complete?
Don’t you just hate it when words get hijacked, particularly when they’ve been grabbed by commerical concerns, forever changing their character, meaning and associations? There are many examples of this over the years that I could cite, but there’s one that really irks me. Perform an interwebs search of any kind for ‘cyberpunk’, and the first 9 billion pages will refer you to a video game, namely ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. Anything else that previously would have come out top of the list gets relegated to the ‘nobody cares’ bracket, tucked away at the end of search pages, where few seldom go.
It’s what I like to term the ‘Trend Effect’TM – basically, in the modern age, anything that has received overwhelming hype, to the point where it becomes the number one, must-have item, for anyone between the ages of 15 and 50 will inevitably skew the whole internet in its favour. Every news aggregator, blogger, re-blogger, review site and social media influencer will jump on the bandwagon, raising its profile exponentially and driving anything else that was previously associated in any way with every search term remotely connected to it, to the bottom of the pile. The real problem, though, is that – as some have learned to their cost – once on the internet, nothing ever goes away, and the sheer bulk of information out there relating to trends current and past, means that those things which have their own specific identity, nothing at all to do with a particular short-term trend, and which really merit their own particular chunk of bandwidth, disappear amongst all the noise.
This, at best, can be inconvenient and annoying if you happen to be looking for something ‘off-trend’, and at worst can be dangerous and misleading, particularly for the Snowflake Generation who are never going to look beyond the third search result, or watch a video longer than 10 seconds and have no concept of the world before 1992. All of which means that from now on the word ‘cyberpunk’ will forever, for them, be inextricably tied to an over-hyped, buggy, futuristic version of Grand Theft Auto meets Robocop.
And that bugs me.
Cyberpunk – both the term and its mythos – were first coined back in 1983 in a short story of the same name, written by Bruce Bethke. You should read it – it’s not that long. It created a whole new cult following and set the ground rules for the genre, notably disaffected youthful protagonists, grouping together to rebel against mainstream society, immersed within a heavily technological and dystopian theme. Later novels, such as Neuromancer, Snowcrash, Otherland and Ready Player One, fleshed out and expanded the cyberpunk genome to encompass the concept of virtual worlds, whilst the likes of Philip K Dick departed from the established themes, but stuck to the gritty, cyberpunk vibe, and gave it a more ‘grown up’ aspect, inspiring such movie classics as Minority Report, Total Recall and, of course, Blade Runner.
Cyberpunk – of the traditional variety – has a very definite feel to it and for Gen X, in particular, it holds a huge attraction and fascination. We grew up with it, whilst experiencing the early days of the internet and communication revolution, which themselves were straight from the pages of a cyberpunk novel. We saw the transition from black and white to colour, and the shift from analogue to digital, and – of course – we loved it, and many of us threw ourselves into it with wild abandon. We were hackers, phreakers, BBS and Listserve addicts; we filled our hours with Usenet, Gopher and FTP… and all before the poor internet had mastered how to do baby steps. We rocked! And, for many of us, the real world really did feel like a dystopian, authoritarian place that we railed against – we, in a very real sense, were truly cyberpunks, and the novels and movies we immersed ourselves in were thrilling glimpses of what one day might be. And we were so up for it!
The only thing missing, was the ability to plug ourselves into a virtual world.
But, even that became possible, eventually.
It all started with Habitat, followed by a rash of – mostly forgotten – virtual worlds and MMORPGs, eventually leading to one which many would argue is the most successful and enduring of all – Second Life. Finally, all us homeless cyberpunks had a real virtual world we could call our own, we were quite literally in our element, and I guess we’ve never looked back.
The best thing about it, is that inworld, I can be the cyberpunk I always wanted to be, not just the crazy real world hacker stuff, but now I can actually surround myself with the trappings of the cyberpunk experience: I can dress as a cyberpunk, style my hair as a cyberpunk and network with others who also consider themselves to be cyberpunks. Quite simply, I’m living the dream… almost.
I still think there’s more to come, and I’m looking forward to the day when I can slip on my haptic suit, snap on my 3D spex and see, hear, feel and er… smell? SL in all its gory visceral detail, just as if I was inside the machine; it’ll come, I’m certain of it, and then I’ll be cyberpunking like never before. You have been warned! Interestingly, way back in the misty pasts of 2001/2002, that’s how Mr Rosedale planned we’d be interacting with the virtual world, but sadly that never happened – who knows where we’d be now if he’d pursued that plan? You can read about The Rig here, and sigh in frustration for what never was, but might have been.
And so the dream continues… one that started in my youth and has persisted throughout my adult life, and hopefully will continue until I’m old, grey and grumpy (well, grumpier), but I promise you one thing: even then, inworld, I’ll be young and free, with crazy hair and mad clothes, beating the system and doing all those amazing, ridiculous, things that only a true cyberpunk can appreciate.
I feel sorry for those to whom the word cyberpunk will only ever mean a mass market video game, full of bugs and never living up to the hype. On second thoughts, actually, I’m not – we don’t want those sort around here! We want rebels who will never be mainstream, those who shun the trappings of popularism: more people like me – and, if that sounds a bit like you, you’re more than welcome to join me!
♦ Now exhibiting at the Nowhere Land Gallery - 'HUMAN';
♦ Let me take you for a ride on the SWR narrow gauge railway don't forget your ticket!;♦ Spring is coming to Nowhere Land - come along and listen to the birdsong and chill in the meadow;
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E-mail me a topic, together with a reason i should use it and, you never know, i might write a 100 word story on it - what have you got to lose?
(See what's gone before here)
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Nobody
"Nobody gets out of here alive."
My chainsmoking companion looked at me sagely. He was a veteran, surviving against all the odds, but he knew his days too were numbered.
"Even those who survive everything they throw at us are doomed. They cart them away, kill them, and cut up the bodies""If I were you, pray for a quick death, not like those poor souls over there"
He gestured towards the other side of the room, where our companions shivered and twitched, tortured, for no apparent reason
A lab technician approached my cage.
I prayed it would be quick.
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Recent updates
Alt. life:
23 Dec - 'Bleak'
Drabble Desk
17 May - 'Nobody'
The Library
14 Jul - 'Custard Creamed'
Moonletters: Up to date
31 May - 'A Poem About Penny Lane
Around the World
09 Apr - 3 new stories
Blogroll & Links
02 Mar
Only In RL
19 Sep- 'On the menu...'
Serendipidy Haven's Musings 