Floaties, Punishment and The Freak Out

A couple of days ago, Michael Hyatt published a delightful little piece entitled, "Why I Stopped Reading Your Blog". It was then that I realized that I am guilty. Guilty as sin. Horribly guilty and worthy of some form of internet based punishment beyond the fall in rankings, beyond the tsk tsking of Google analytics.

I am sorry dear friends. For life got the best of me. Yet here I sit. Before the keyboard. In a panic. The next few months will be some of the most challenging in my life as I prepare a graduate thesis atop a full course load, applications for new programs, then packing and life making. It is my hope that in time, I will again be able to provide you useless, snarky criticisms of virtual life. Because you know, we all need more elucidation in our world. (See how I used the big word? Aren't you proud?)

In the meantime, I'm off to find some floaties and learn to float in the pool of life. Swimming comes later - let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

I leave you with a favourite clip from a favourite movie that summarizes exactly where I am. Daily. Hourly. By the minute. Enjoy!

You're My Hero!

With the passing of John Hughes comes the end of an era. "Ferris Bueller, you're my hero!" will no longer be said with the zest it once was, but instead, with a slight sadness in tone, a reflection of time past, a longing for understanding that all Hughes films gave us in our teens. That understanding kept us going, told us it was better to be ourselves than anyone else, and that it's smart to take inspiration from anywhere, not just those places - or people - who are "cool".

In all of the reading I have done lately on the late Hughes, no one said it better than Scott Bradley in an August 13th article entitled Don't You Forget About Me, in the New City. Here, Bradley gives us "Scooty's Mollyfesto": quips and wisdom from 1980's Midwest films that touched our hearts.

1. It is futile to compare your inside to another's outside; we are all outsiders on the inside.
2. Even if it's applying lipstick with your cleavage, take pride in your small accomplishments.
3. Don't take Ducky in your life for granted; true friendship will always outlast fleeting romance.
4. Face life's little humiliations with a dramatic roll of the eyes and move on.
5. Bite your lip to bring clarity to confusion.
6. Never trust the pretty rich people; they really don't care about you. No, really. Unless, of course, they are played by Molly.
7. Be open to inspiration from the most unlikely sources, even the geek in braces.
8. When life hands you ugly pink fabric, make yourself a hideous dress and dance!

John Hughes, you're my hero.

Top SL Blogs

As a service to you, gentle reader, I provide an extensive list of many active Second Life blogs, compliments of virtual pal ArminasX Saiman's Second Effects. Yes, you will note RLTS made the list which, given I had been out of world when this was collected/written and relatively offline for six months prior, I am honoured, not to mention surprised.

Dying to know the top ten? Check 'um out. And be sure to visit Second Effects for the full list.

Second Life Blogs by Technorati Rank

( 1 ) Massively
( 2 ) Official Second Life Blog
( 3 ) iheartsl.com
( 4 ) Virtual Worlds News
( 5 ) New World Notes
( 6 ) Raph's Website
( 7 ) VintFalken.com
( 8 ) Torley Lives
( 9 ) Not Possible IRL
( 10 ) Free*Style

Oooo and one more thing - patience paid off. This walking party provider made the iReport in re: SL6B. Go figure.

Confessions of a Book Junkie

With the beginning of the new school year it should be no surprise to learn that I totally dig books. In fact, I am known to hang out in more than one reading room in SL. This should not surprise anyone given I grew up in a place where I spent at least 4 hours, five times a week across the street from a book store so big it took up a whole city block. When I hit my teen years, they put in a cafe across from the old and rare book room (OMG). And they also opened up smaller satellite stores including one of nothing but techno junkie manuals. Yeah, I have a bibliophilia problem - I am a bibliophiliac.

The list below has apparently been floating about the blogosphere according to dear virtual pal Thoria Millgrove. I have stolen her idea and bolded those I have completed, starred those I love, and italicized those on my reading or soon-to-read list.

Thanks Tho!


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll*
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert*
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett*
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens*
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl*
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

With that I say, "Let go of the mouse, step away from the computer and pick up that bound pile of paper over there. Yeah. That one. They call it a 'book'."

*drooling*

Things have been pretty crazy around here lately, so crazy that I rejoyced as I was able to log into SL for a total of 13 minutes last night - the first time in about a month. I was delighted to have a conversation with a total of two people - Catty and Earth -- all for about 2 minutes each before falling alseep.

And yes, I drool.

SL Statistics

Apparently, just under 1/3 of SLers Plurk when SL is down. Interestingly, Plurk is not the major cause of drama. Thanks to Haley Salomon for sharing this insightful research project with the RLTS readers.

And by the way - when I don't respond to an IM, I'M WORKING. No, I'm not interested in cake and yes, my graphics card does suck. I'm just saying....

Brought to you by The SL Revolution

The Great Move

I love change. Well, controlled change anyway. I was laid off from my SL job, moved out of the tree house in SL, and lost my SL boyfriend to RL. I also quit my RL job, moved out of my RL house, and gained a RL boyfriend.

In other words, lots of change going on. Promise to be back in SL soon with oodles of new fun to be had.

In the meantime, I share with you the following. Please note especially numbers 89, 94 and 100. These have a special place in my heart. 50 More Rules in Second Life (Yes, there are 50 more prior to these! Enjoy!)

Ribs

New Beginnings

When you have fifteen things to do in a day, they all take an hour each, and you have to worry about eating, sleeping, and the normal showering, something has to give. And when something big happens, something so totally cool that you want to drop everything, reality kicks in. You have to reorganize.

The AC Live team will miss sharing our tunes in world. We're excited about the future and can't wait for you to be too!

Happy New Year to one and all. Here's to new beginnings!

Happy Noob-a-licious

I really have to log in more often and hit my regular spots.

Giant Noob at the Cork Factory. It's terrifying.

Army of Women

I don't often write about the real world. But, in honor of a real life friend who has been there four times, I offer that October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. With one in eight women having breast cancer throughout their lifetime, it makes sense that today they've launched an Army of Women.

One of the reasons (they say) that the research isn't done for breast cancer is that they don't have the bodies - healthy and ill- to study. So one bright gal got the idea to put out the call.

Want to help? Sign up. If you fit the mold for a study, they will email you. You can then request more information and see if it is something in which you want to participate. If it is, let them know. If not, delete.

Where? http://www.armyofwomen.org. Join us today.

AFK Prank War

I don't usually do this but dang, it was just so sooooo funny.

Methinks Crap Mariner is trying to start something... AFK pranks. Check it out.

The Crash Monster

Hanging at the Blarney in the morning, I ran into a rather unusual avi - Maximus Madfes. Thing is, he's one rather nasty looking bat. Tends to hang from the ceiling too which threw all the newbies for a loop. It was just then that one lovely woman was struggling to recover from the new version install and continued to crash. As anyone who knows me knows, I beat the daylights out of the crash monster on a regular basis -- that mysterious monster out there responsible for lag, crashing, and other nasties.

Maximus Madfes: I think she crashed
You: Poor girl
Maximus Madfes: That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it
You: Do you ever get full Max?
Ribbons Whitfield freezes
You: Wait.
You: Are YOU the crash monster?
Maximus Madfes: Shhh

Apparently, he prefers Avis doused in garlic butter...

Retro Girl

In light of being suckered... er... um... encouraged to sign up to become a Mentor Buddy, it occurred to me that it was time for a new profile pic (new pic --> see left). The one I had been using was taken my first month in SL and well, I've changed a bit since then. It's affectionately been referred to as "old school". That said, I turned to a guy who has tremendous talent but who refuses to let me use his name. Basically, he wants to continue to do in SL what he does, without any interruptions. This kills me because hello, check out his talent.

Thoughts? Opinions? Criticisms (be gentle)? Lemme know!

Language Barriers

When speaking with my Brazilian friend, I'm always put to shame as the only foreign words I know generally name food while his English is flawless. That's why I am taking this opportunity to share the one moment in nearly six months that he was not familiar with an American phrase.

Ribbons Whitfield: How did it go today?
Guy: Let's say that if I had lots of bananas and a baby chimp, the job would get done exactly the same way. Might have been the most tedious mission ever, but it's all done now.
Ribbons Whitfield: To the victor go the spoils?
Guy: I have absolutely no idea what that means... but it can't be good
Ribbons Whitfield: He who wins the war gets the gold
Ribbons Whitfield: Or he who takes the village gets the pillage rights
Guy: LOL
Ribbons Whitfield: You know, and the best virgins.

Peer Pressure

Join my plurk.

(You know you wanna.)

MUAH.

The Future: VR, Beartender, and a Pizza

I entered into virtual reality at the tender age of 12... Or maybe it was 11. In any case, I was a tween before we knew what a tween was. In fact, I actually remember the 300 baud rate and what a great guy I thought my Dad was when he stepped me straight up to a 1200 baud, skipping the 6. That's kind of like going from one of those elementary age cell phones that will only dial your parents straight to the new i-phone with unlimited usage requirements.

Anyway, by the time I turned 13 I was hanging out in a virtual bar, with a virtual bartender (known as Beartender, or, Kevin in RL) struggling over how to spell "heels" so as to not look like a 13 year old in an adult virtual space. Now I just know SOMEONE is protesting saying "It's not possible! At 300 baud you were..." and they're right. We were hanging out on a BBS - aka Bulletin Board System. Think pre telnet and pre packet radio connection.

So we hung out, the lot of us. I made a lot of friends early and of course, was part of the original development of some of the emoticons. For instance, :----->* meant blowing a kiss. Betcha didn't know THAT one.

Our little minds spun. I remember the day I had this great idea. We could one day create a world where you could create little cartoon people to make them look like you (or anyone else or anything you wanted), and we could all meet in a real virtual bar. Wouldn't that be cool? Oh and it would sell virtual beer. Ooo and what else could we sell? We could create a whole world of this stuff! How neat! Imagine the economic models you could play with... not to mention the games you could play against people from all over, like you know, Bobby from over three blocks. It wasn't long before a bunch of us were chit chatting about what the virtual future would look like, and of course, what technologies were coming along that might lead us there one day.

So after a long hiatus involving a little mistake with the Milnet and a computer that reminded me certain things were off limits (thank you Global Thermal Nuclear War), I re-entered the VR in college, post Al Gore's invention of the Internet. While I still don't get gopher, I can now navigate my way around most settings and programs.

Having been in SL now for well over a year, I find it interesting to look back and think on what we imagine it to be. We weren't too far off. We also never dreamed all of this.

It was not too long ago that Google, or Yahoo, or Sony or SOMEONE was discussing the integration of an X-Box (or like gaming cube) to SL. Then someone mentioned the other day the effort to integrate Warcraft and other VR systems so that you could TP from one SL sim (say, while surfing) to a portal in Warcraft (or other VR entity). This is a little exciting to me because we have come from 300 baud rate to integrating VRs from all over the world, probably under one code which is as close to digital nirvana as one can get.

So here is your future: You'll conduct a round in Warcraft, TP over to a SL beach sim where you can decompress from a hard day, order a pizza through a virtual kiosk HUD that will be delivered straight to your RL front door which is opened by remote, but paid through your Linden account, and check your' child's homework completion status all from your desktop. And to think, it all started at least for me, at 300 baud.

Chalk Drawings and a Sense of Finality

This picture was taken at the high in Skiddaw, owned by Nexeus Fatale.

All I can say is I found Nex this way. That, and I didn't do it.

TE on Sale?!?!

Complements of a contact in a TE group:

Greetings all! This is to let you know that Tiny Empires is on sale for half-price, starting right now and going through this weekend. The Full version is L$249 and the Federation hud is L$149. If you're in the U.S., Happy Independence Day! Sale ends Sunday night July 6th 8pm SLT. Giftbox version is not eligible.

Dig it? ;)

SL Boredom

When crusty SLers get bored...


Random house. Sim owner allowed build. *shaking head* I should be critical and say this was a horrible infringement but I cannot stop laughing long enough to do so. lmao

When Your Avi Walks and Talks...

I'm sitting in a RL English Pub, watching a RL Euro Cup game and I look over and see a woman who is not only striking, but extremely familiar. I turn to my friends and, with my jaw dropped, point as I am unable to verbalize any other response. (I still feel guilty for pointing - my mother would have had a fit!)

My companions turn to look in the direction of my rude point and also drop their jaws. It was most unfortunate that I didn't have a camera -- this woman looked exactly, I mean almost EXACTLY like my avi. SHE was Ribbons.

Why do I suddenly feel bad? LMAO

(Photo from blog.rlove.org)