second life – Les said, the better II

How I got Second Life on Linux

When I tried to run Second Life’s beta release on linux, from the command line, I got the following error:

64-bit Linux detected.
Running from /home/celesteh/.secondlife-install
 - Installing menu entries in /home/celesteh/.local/share/applications
bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
*** Bad shutdown ($LL_RUN_ERR). ***

You are running the Second Life Viewer on a x86_64 platform.  The
most common problems when launching the Viewer (particularly
'bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: not found' and 'error while
loading shared libraries') may be solved by installing your Linux
distribution's 32-bit compatibility packages.
For example, on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linuxes you might run:
$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk ia32-libs-kde ia32-libs-sdl

*******************************************************
This is a BETA release of the Second Life linux client.
Thank you for testing!
Please see README-linux.txt before reporting problems.

I checked if I had libGL.so.1 installed. I did:

$ sudo find / -name libGL.so.1
[sudo] password for celesteh: 
/usr/lib32/mesa/libGL.so.1
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1

I went to the directory where Second Life installs itself (the install.sh script tells you where this is when you run it. And I edited the script called SecondLife. I changed this line:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"

To this:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD/lib:/usr/lib32/mesa:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"

Note that /usr/lib32/mesa is one of the results I got from running find. It’s the one that seems to be 32 bit.
After I fixed that, it opened (and popped a warning saying my computer is underpowered, which I assume is another library issue. I have NO IDEA what to do about this. Will update if and when I figure it out.
I know what you’re thinking. and the answer is that the network is the computer. And the live coding is the music. and SecondLiveCoding is the future.

New Auction / blah blah blah

Auction #4 is up. #3 is still bidless, alas. The last two were bought by somebody who is a stranger, which is a milestone. Future milestones include: purchaser who doesn’t know me AND isn’t a composer, continued interest past initial publicity.

Since I’m blogging anyway, I thought I could shine my wisdom on one of the most pressing issues of the internet age:

Why Second Life Sucks

I read Snow Crash in 1998. I was already involved in some Virtual Reality stuff by means of a MOO, but after reading that, I redoubled my efforts. The discussion in the book, for example, on how to make an invisible avatar lead to me figuring out how to make invisible objects in the Moo. (I was evil at the time, alas.) The virtual world described in the book was fascinating and wonderful. I remember thinking at the time that a few things seemed off, but overall, I was ready to sign on.
So when Second Life seemed to be nearing critical mass, I signed on. Here is a virtual platform for art, I thought. Here is a place where people from all of the world can experience a sound installation which is not actually physical in form! Very cool things could be happening. So I signed on.
They weren’t. Cool things were definitely not happening. Virtual casinos were happening, but coolness is if it’s on SL, is in a non-obvious hiding place. Because the people who are trying to make Snow Crash‘s Metaverse real have missed one of the crucial points of the book:

Snow Crash is about a failed society

Let me repeat that: Snow Crash is about a failed society. Life in the SC future really sucks. The protagonist lives in a storage shed. Pizza is delivered by mobsters. People live in chains of walled subdivisions which are copies of each other. They have to pay exorbitant fees to use a clean toilet. Thousands of refugees are trapped on a giant raft, adrift at sea. The SC future sucks!
The thing that struck me as most off in the book was people paying for avatars. The book, which I don’t have on this continent, alas, describes how noobs first sign on with a generic avatar called ~~Brad~~ Clint or Brandy. They pay for it and then pay to upgrade. I could accept the massively over-centralized computers and even the Max Headroom plotline hacking humans with code. But the economy of the Metaverse just seemed wrong.
So the people at Linden Labs came along and were perhaps even more fascinated by SC than I was (or at least definitely took a more graphical approach) and set about faithfully recreating the idea. Including the failed state part.
Look, if I want to scrounge for money to buy clothes and stuff, I like to do it in a game called Real Life, not in my play time. In SC capitalism has run amok and destroyed the social fabric. That’s not the part of the book to emulate. The point of the book is that the economic model used in it is all wrong.
I’ve heard rumors that Google is looking into it’s own metaverse. I have higher hopes for their version. Google’s economic model is the same one used for newspapers and print media. Charge advertisers for eyeballs. Deliver content to the eyeballs at a loss. Despite the disaster that is Orkut, there’s a good chance that Google will realize that we’re not in a (yet entirely) failed state and will give us something more in tune with our reality if not somewhat more optimistic. If they don’t do it, well, the SL code is at least open source now, which is one step better than Neal Stephenson’s dystopia.

Edit

thank you Jenny, for remembering the names fo the avatars.

Virtual Installations

I’ve spent much of today trying to figure out how to do make virtual sound installations in Second Life. From what I’ve seen for sale, it’s probably possible. But SL is not a sharing sort of community. It’s more of a capitalist system. If you want to upload stuff, you’ve got to have the Lindens (10$L / file). If you want land, you need Lindens. So you can get them by sacrificing real money or you can make stuff in SL to sell (but it will cost you to upload the raw materials, so you have to recover your costs) or you can get a virtual job.

there’s no better way to relax from spending all day staring at a computer screen at work than to come home and stare at a computer screen doing my second virtual shift for (semi-real) play money. No wonder the IRS wants to tax this game. No wonder the NYT and other papers are happily wildly inflating the numbers of regular users. No wonder corporations are busily putting up ads. They love this. It’s a model they get. Money buys stuff. There’s no weird “sharing” or other hard-to-grok economies. People sell stuff to each other and so rich folks and corporations get all the cool stuff because they can invest in finding and paying people to create it for them. Second Life is a lot like Real Life.
I think it is on the upswing and will continue to grow, but probably without me. I would have put in the effort to photograph my favorite shirt to upload it as a texture map for my avatar to wear (in human speak: I was taking pictures of my shirt so my player could wear it), but I’m not going to pay for the privilege of generating content on a private network. I’m not opposed to paying for things. I pay for flickr. Because my free account had upload limits that I wanted to exceed. I wanted to exceed them because of positive experiences I had after I uploaded some stuff without paying. First I got positive feedback, then I gave out some money. The new economy is not dead. First, prove to me that you’ve got something worthwhile, then offer me more if I pay you. It’s a good model.

My Avatar isn’t wearing underwear

I joined Second Life recently. I have a sort of a fascination with VR environments. I used to run a MOO (like a MUD but object-oriented). I wrote about a bajillion objects for the MOO. Unfortunately, most of my objects cannot be ported to the visual world of SL because they violate the TOS. Alas.

Anyway, about 3 years ago I did a sound project associated with the MOO. I have the idea that I could do virtual installations. SL has about 100K active members, so it’s not a large potential audience, really. But I think it’s got legs. I joined after reading an article about copyright issues in the Washington Post. I don’t know if this means SL has jumped the shark or if it has just broken into the mainstream.
It’s funny how just wearing such a goofy outfit virtually makes me kind of uncomfortable. Back into normal pants (and no wings) right after the screen grab. I’m so uptight. I can’t let my inner-gay shine through. alas
In other news, work is afoot to turn the wiimote into a general HID for things like gameplay use. That would allow me to practice using it and play a game at the same time. w00t. There’s also plans underway to make it play nicely with SuperCollider. I’m all over that.
To my non-american readers: I’m sorry about the insane amount of idiom. I’m like a 19 year old Canadian coming home from the US and getting drunk.

Glossay

VR Virtual Reality
MUD Multi User Demon – a text based virtual reality simulation. It allowed the users to modify the environment.
TOS Terms of Service – an agreement that I have to follow
jump the shark pass the high point of it’s popularity. Something keeps getting cooler and cooler until it jumps the shark and then is embarrassingly not cool.
wiimote new kind of remote control / joystick for the new nintendo game system
HID Human Interface Device – a joystick or silimar
w00t hooray! yay! super! wow! a happy noise. only sort of cynical at the same time.
all over that in favor of