BUN 2.0!!!!

Hey! I'm EXCITED!!! There's this GREAT NEW ART THINGIE by Linden Labs I need to MICROBLOG about!!!! plus i need to RSS it pronto, Tonto!

It's being BRANDED BUN 2.0 (i got the word through reputable sources) and it's so modern!!!! Bring on the dancing horses!

Yes! it is all AJAX-ENABLED, DATA-DRIVEN, CLOUD-SOURCED and as KEWL as FARMVILLE© without the COW POOPY*!!! It is iTASTIC© and ATOMIZED! It's DYNAMIC and STATIC with its' own API! It's a complete MASHUP of WIKIFIED SOCIAL NETWORKING and totally TRANSPARENT!!!!! It has INNOVATION for daze!!!!

Some of SECOND LIFE©'s best ARTVATARS© and CONTENT CURATORS will be MINDSHARING this total PARADIGM SHIFT and GRABBING EYEBALLS to SYNC UP with MAXIMUM BANDWIDTH!!!!

So get in on this eHAWT START-AROUND, fire up your SOCIAL SOFTWARE, CHECK IN, get VIRAL and TWEET IT UP on your HALFALOGUES FTW!!!!

And be sure to TAG my postie so peeps can DIGG it and I can snatch me sum SOCIAL CAPITAL!!!!! If you aren't SOA you're SOL**!!!

Legal Stuffs: This AFFILIATE PROGRAM is in no way eCOMMERCED! We swearz!!! Artvatars© 2010 by Pixie Brainz, LLC.


Meanwhile... Burning Man is still "Burning Man." Geez, how BRAND-LAGGED is that?!??!?! Buncha OLD peeps, f'sure, pwned n r00ted*** (rolls eyes) Llamas***


*"cow poopy" not on the Official List of 2.0 Buzzwords
** Ancient pre-1.0 word
*** old skool creds

UPDATE: erm, i has been inform-ed that it is "Burn 2.0" and not "Bun 2.0" so pls ignore my whole postie :D

UPDATE #2 - at a swank soire of soror's (+2 for alliteration) BUN 2.0 morphed into BUM 2.0, which i kinda like a lot. Just think... a giant burning 2.0 browser encased in large SCULPTY buttocks (in honor of Qarl), perhaps emerging from the crack...

if anyone wants to contribute a few sims for a BUM 2.0 parallel event, let me know; i'm sure there's HUNDREDS of artists and citizens who would participate ^_^

The Creativity Crisis - SL & elsewise + Facebook eats dirt

Newsweek is running an article entitled "The Creativity Crisis" which points out something that has worried me (and a great many computer/technical people) for quite awhile now. You can see it in the slew of remakes-of-remakes-of-classic films, girl-singers-who-you-can't-tell-apart, facebook-clones, web 2.0 gaga, flash-reinventions-of-old-concepts and gaming. Recycled (and lamer in execution) concepts with perhaps a small facelift or pancake makeup, offering nothing new or stimulating; only something recognizeable with a new "shiny" attached to it like a leech or a Botox injection.

I see the same problem in Second Life. Coming from a background helping to build the original VRs (Alphaworld, Cybertown, blacksun, Worlds, etc.) I am often saddened and disappointed in the so-called "progress" of SL and VRs in general. In 1997... we had "video on a prim," integrated email-from-within-world, stereo sound (my personal beef with SL's crippling of the FMOD sound engine), inworld and outworld-integrated IM... the list could go on. And all this useable from any browser... until MS polluted and subverted the W3C HTML standards and brought the VRML concept crashing down in their bid to take over and monetize the net.

Sure, in SL these things are better-integrated; sure, the interface is cleaned up... but what is new? 13 years of "progress" and we still have crashing browsers, borky asset servers, completely and stupidly non-functional "group chat," teleport problems, crapping-out sound... and what new paradigms? Just a refinement/prettying-up of the same concepts and functions I could use in 1997. I am not goggle-eyed nor romantic about SL's interface, having something to compare it with.


I see the same thing in SL among artworks. Of course artists are going to be influenced by things they see and applications of technique; scripting, texture tricks, spacial tricks; the uniqueness of the 3D worldspace. When you see something done with a tool you didn't know existed or something that causes you to re-examine or understand some aspect of 3D creation, it's natural that you will experiment with the technique, and that technique will have echoes to other's work (think flexi prims, texture fades/changes, inworld physics exploits, etc.)

But when you can look at a piece and instantly think, "Oh, that's Alizarin's work" or "Ah! I see Soror is working again" only to find another artist's signature on the work, that is clearly a lift, in the same way there were hundreds of Warhol imitators or fake Picassos. A school of art will have similar thematics, approaches and materials, yes; but an Apollinaire did not look like a copy of Picasso nor Juan Gris. Each artist used the techniques and philosophy of their particular school but managed to imprint their individual voices and styles in their works to the point where you could recognize a Picasso as a Picasso, and not a Gris, almost instantly.


It grates on my nerves (the few I have left anyways). When someone imitates a better-known artist, bringing nothing new to a composition - no individual voice, no interesting perspective, no vision - I dismiss the work, no matter how technically proficient the handling of that imitation is. Technique is mechanics, and mechanics can be learned, taught, imitated. What cannot be imitated is an artist's vision, and vision is what interests me in art.

So I am considering my "Fake Imitation" series, begun with a gentle joke for my friend Soror Nishi about the SL art scene with my work "nise ichiyou no Soror" (A Fake Imitation of Soror). Perhaps I will do "nise ichiyou no Ali" next, as I am seeing quite a few copies of Alizarin's thematic approach lately. But I will have to get a lot smarter before I can do "nise ichiyou no Glyph" :( Stay tuned.

[btw, i did try "nise ichiyou no Oberon" but i crashed the sim. Success?]

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

PS - for the idiot "Web 2.0 buzzword monetize lets-try-to-get-in-on-something-that-already-is-old-because-it's-making-money Linden Lab MBA theorists," try directing them to this PC Magazine article entitled "Facebook, MySpace Get Failing Grade on Customer Satisfaction." Maybe this will influence the rush-towards-trashing-SL-in-favor-of-a-concept-we-didn't-get-in-on-early-enough-and-which-we-suck-at. Perhaps LL needs some people who have grown up on the net to tell them the elementary rule of the net: you lag, you lose.

So quit screwing the interface in a poor imitation of an already-existing suck-wind concept and get on with building the metaverse's future. Quit trying to sell half a baby to Facebook idiots who will drop the platform as soon as they get bored playing Farmville.

Summer Doldrums & Getting High On Music

Wired is running a great story about the Mustang school district in Oklahoma warning about the dangers of digital drugs - specifically binaural beat patterns in music.

Luckily, no one from that Oklahoma school district has visited my Temple of the Radiant Moon, where such beat patterns, along with alpha, theta and other Extremely Low Frequency [ELF] waves are incorporated into all the ToneSpheres. The Temple was designed to both relax you and to stimulate the pineal and corpus callosum using sound and color.

A lot of my own research for many years has been on the effects of sound and vibration on the human nervous system. The waves in the Temple took a lot of work, owing to the need for the wave cycles to be continuous and measured to loop at the right rates to produce the binaural beat effect without clicks or pops.

It is most effective to use such patternings with headphones on; the alpha and theta waves will reproduce through your speakers but you won't get the binaural effects unless you are wearing 'phones.

So please, if you are from Oklahoma and you are in Second Life, get a note from your Mommy, Nanny or designated School Thought Police monitor before coming to my Garden. Thank you ^_^

SLurl: The Temple of the Radiant Moon in the Garden of Sound

Other than that, it's summer; cicadas are singing and I am being lazy.