Most of you would have heard about the mandatory clean feed that will filter all Australian’s internet for them. How thoughtful of them. We can all now breathe a sigh of relief.

Aside from all indications pointing to the censorship creep having an authoritarian stranglehold on our ‘free media’, this shit will slow my internet down! That pox is slow enough!! (thanks so much, Telstradevilspawn). So, as I know everyone’s greatest concern is the speed of my internet, PLEASE sign the petition here.

As most internet users would be, I am completely incensed by this. If you’re interested, I wrote an extensive essay on why this concept would not work and would cause logistical disasters and benefit no-one. Check it here. I am off to go find some kittens.

While the documentary provided only a superficial analysis of what are essentially incredibly complex and unprecedented relationships emerging from a new and unexplored social space, it was surprisingly heart wrenching to watch the story of Carolyn and Lee, an American couple whose lives and marriage is slowly torn apart by her addiction and ‘virtual affair’ in second life. The disturbing yet arresting story of Carolyn’s second life addiction slowly unfolds against the backdrop of her neglected home, where dishes pile in the sink, the windows are taped up to prevent light coming in and even the room has been completed painted except for the area around her computer – she clearly couldn’t spare the time from the game to relocate. In the next room play her four (presumably lonely) children, and her baffled and dismayed husband, as she quenches her 14-hours-a-day SL habit, which she explains to her kids as akin to ‘playing barbie’. See, in real life Carolyn is a pudgy, ordinary looking, depressed housewife. In SL she is a ravishing vixen brunette, with the body of a goddess and a virtual partner to match – cue Elliot, who lives in Britian, is small, also ordinary and caucasian, but in SL is a huge black man with numerous piercings, bulging pecs toting two uzi’s and a sword (why not after all).

The subplot of second life features Kiera and Dean, two relatively unattractive brits who also personify their wildest dreams through their SL avatars (as Kiera sadly says, in second life she looks like she ‘should have looked’ before her life took over, aka got really fat). These two get married in second life in front their family and friends (in realtime, of course, and there were real tears and it was real love) and spend the majority of their time together in the game. As Kiera puts it so succinctly, ‘In real life we life in a tiny house and it rains all the time. In second life we life in a huge mansion on the beach!!’ But their story is happy, having met up, married in real life and lived (virtually) ever after.

Carolyn and Elliot’s tale, on the other hand, is not so rosy. These two would often spend eight to ten hours a day together over their 10 month affair, and their complex relationship involved arguments, breakups, reconciliation, more arguments, secret rendezvous and cybersex, while real life, and her real family, continued on without her. But Carolyn is devastated when Elliot decides to end the relationship, deciding it will ‘go nowhere’ (I am not sure where he expected it to go??), and so flees her family for the UK in the hope that her and her virtual love could perhaps make it work in RL.

Needless to say, and to cut a rather tragic story short, it doesn’t, and Carolyn, is forced to confront reality again when she discovers that the virtual world doesn’t necessarily translate to RL communication and relationships. But oh! How fascinating it was to watch these people live out their complete fantasies, their utter hedonistic desires, without really understanding the ramifications to their real lives, nor, it would seem, the difference between the real and the imaginary.

The issues of SL were only lightly touched on but plentiful, with the primary being why people enter and become addicted to SL in the first place – to be someone they cannot be in RL. What was so interesting (and concerning) was the complete absorption into this virtual world, and their gradual inability to distinguish the two. While her real life decomposed around her, Carolyn could care only for herself in SL.

In an interview about WOW, a Professor studying the phenomena of virtual worlds argued that because the internet was real, so too were these virtual worlds. But if so, then this must be considered real cheating, not just some ‘game’, or virtual cheating. I know were it my partner, I would be devastated, and not just virtually, either. Regular (addicted??) players also argued that in the future, people would spend their entire lives in virtual spaces. And why not?? In a society obsessed by image, consumerism and egocentricity, SL is the answer to all your physical, financial and personal shortcomings. It’s just a shame you will have to make love to your keyboard.

Watch the doco on youtube here.

My attention was drawn today to this amazing story. In 1999, Nicholas White was inadvertently (actually, when would it ever be otherwise) trapped in an elevator for forty hours. Oh the agony. Surely half of the world’s worst nightmare. Certainly mine.

More interesting is the video that captured the whole thing. Not only is this video fascinating to watch (I admit the music helps), but it is also presented in a rhizome format with the four recordings all playing simultaneously. I know this is a pretty abstract parallel I am drawing, but it is interesting to note how the action in all four screens contributes to the overall viewing experience. It’s quite surreal. It also contains some elements of the lumiere – fixed camera, constant with no edits. If you removed the music, the speeding up and cut it at 60 seconds, voila!

Ok, fine. It’s just hella interesting, ya?

Sure enough, downloaded from mog, uploaded into my blog and….nothing. I am not one hundred percent sure, but I don’t think the theme I am using supports a blogroll function (it is pretty old). The last time I edited/changed my blog roll, I had to go into the theme editor, open the sidebar section and edit in my links manually. Time consuming stuff.

Of course, being the misoneist that I am, I am loathe to get a different theme, and that is why I have no fabulous new blog roll.

I’m going to ask Adrian in class if this is just me being daft, or if this is actually a possibility. Perhaps if I could somehow extract the urls from the opml file i could just copy and paste them into my sidebar?? Putting them in one by one seems tooooo time consuming though, so for the moment you will just have to deal with the current blogroll. It’s still very tasty.

Collaborative projects can include writing, art, opinions and even news.

Perhaps slightly less academic or interesting than an example like wikipedia (for instance), I came across an example of this in a project called drawball.

What you want to watch is an example of a year of contributions to to drawball at 40 hours per second, giving you an idea of it’s progress over time, and the numerous different contributors… (viva korea!)

I am all for saving whales, but I guess that cause becomes somewhat redundant when they are condemned to a life of swallowing shopping bags and milk bottle caps.

A short documentary called Alphabet Soup was made, highlighting this astounding and horrifying issue. I hope to host it eventually on my blog, but in the meantime you can watch it here.

Sometimes this world is so fucked up.

Much less plastic for me.

So let’s experiment with an image… here is a pretty picture.

more to come…