Since I’ve been huddled indoors all week with a cold which refuses to budge (despite generous applications of vitamins, caffeine and healthy food), we have another “no proper photography” week on our hands. So, a snap-shot from Second Life instead:

That’s yours truly (as my alter ego, Isambard Portsmouth) taking a constitutional in the Botanical Gardens at Straylight, whose enterprising owner has realised that the best way to promote and market his skill with sculpties is to make a place that people will visit just because it looks nice.

It’s about as close to nature as you’ll get in SL at the moment … and when you have an inkling as to the degree of work and expertise involved in creating objects like those trees, it’s even more impressive.

Writing about music

The barrage of music reviewing continues apace; I’ve upped the number of albums I cover in recent weeks because my newly rationalised working procedures have permitted me to do so, but I think I’m now at a peak quota. If I take on any more, and I’ll have no flex left to incorporate other forms of work into my schedule, and I’m hoping that some other forms of work may well be in the pipeline as we speak.

I’ve also been looking into the logistics and planning of my proposed solo music reviews site, as well as poking around with Wordpress themes and costing up my hosting options. Watch this space!

So, here’s a few highlights from my music reviews that went live this week:

• Frames, the awesome new Oceansize album
• Transworld Ultra Rock, the latest full-of-fun offering from Japanese comedy rockers Electric Eel Shock
• Victory Pill’s eponymous debut album - VP being the new project of Jim “Pitchshifter/Prodigy” Davies

The next month or so will see me interviewing some of my favourite bands, including the aforementioned Oceansize and Hundred Reasons. As yet unconfirmed (but still a distinct possibility) is a chat with none other than Sir Henry of Rollins. Note to self - bullsh*t questions are not going to wash with this particular interviewee!

Writing about books

Completed my review of Karl Schroeder’s Queen Of Candesce, and sent it off to TTA Towers along with all the other reviews to be included in Interzone #213. So most of the writing about books I’ve been concerned with this week has been stuff written by other people, but that’s fine - I’m learning a lot about different ways of writing from having to edit other people’s work.

I’ve also been taking notes in preparation for writing a review of Lucius Shepard’s Dagger Key collection (for Vector) over the weekend to come. I wasn’t sure what I’d make of the book when I was sent it, as I’m not an aficionado of ‘dark fantasy’, but suffice to say that I now understand why so many people told me I was lucky to be given the book to review - he’s quite a writer. I’m not sure if I’d go out of my way to buy his stuff in future, but I’d certainly recommend him to fantasy and horror fans of my acquaintance.

Next on the slate is McDonald’s Brasyl, which has been in the queue for a long time, but needs to be reviewed for Foundation …

Writing about other stuff

My ‘beginner’s guide to Second Life’ is currently being incorporated into the coming edition of D+PAD Magazine, and if it looks as good as the current issue, I’m going to be proud to see my name next to it. And I’ve been asked to follow on with a regular SL column, too … so, time to start cribbing from Warren Ellis!

Writing at VCTB

Yeah, I know, I’ve been slack as hell. If you’re interested in excuses, I’ll mention that a certain amount of ‘bedding-in’ of the new bloggers at Futurismic has been ongoing, and that this damnable cold has slowed me down considerably - thinking clearly is still a matter of conscious effort, and hard to sustain for more than half an hour at a time. But I’ll be back on form soon, don’t you worry …

Books and magazines seen

None. Nada. Nowt. Naff all. Not a terrible occurrence, because the TBR pile is quite big enough already … but unusual enough to be notable. I feel strangely incomplete.

Coda

The weekend arrives, and with it grey clouds and rain … I table a motion to declare this The Most. Rubbish. Summer. EVAR.

Still, the weekend is the weekend, and it brings with it plenty of things to do. Tonight is the grand final of The Wedgewood Rooms battle-of-the-bands, where yours truly will be dispensing his judicial decisions for the last time this year. However, due to this enduring illness, I’m not going to be drinking … meaning I get the fun of watching everyone else steadily descend into gibbering inebriation, which should more than compensate.

Sunday is the last of the month, which sees me down at Tongues And Grooves, the poetry and music open-mic night I attend. We’ve no special guest this month, instead concentrating on local artists, and I have a fifteen minute slot to fill with readings of my own work and that of other people, which should be fun (if a trifle nerve-wracking - I never have gotten over the stage-fright thing, even in a small venue with no stage).

But first things first - it’s time for The Friday Curry Of Justice, as is traditional. Have a good weekend, folks. Hasta luego!

Yet more pre-emptive posts of pictures from Second Life - you lucky people!

This rather unassuming flatbed truck has special powers thanks to the 1337 sk1llz of its creator, the one and only Facemelt Loon, who you can see in the driving seat:

It may not be apparent, but we’re parked in a skybox about 700 metres above the surface of the Wastelands, there - Loon hacked the car script so it can go places that cars normally should not be able to go. Shortly after this image was taken, we performed an experiment with SL gravity.

Then there was demolition derby that crashed the sim, but we don’t talk about that …

Oh, you thought just because I was out of town for a few days, you’d get a break from my Second Life evangelism? Mwah-hah-hah! With your dying breath, you shall curse the scheduled post feature of Wordpress …

That there is my first building project of any worth whatsoever; it’s my attempt to recreate the RIOTwheel, which is possibly the coolest mode of transport I’ve ever seen anywhere.

It fits with the aesthetics of the neighbourhood, too. It works, too - though the functionality is pretty basic at the moment, I need to learn more script-fu before I can perfect it. In the meantime, however, I have a way of fleeing the local battle-trucks …

Well, talk about sychronicity. Mere days after I post a picture from my jaunt around Mexico, I hear that I can wander the ruins of Chichen Itza once again … without even having to leave my swivel-chair, let alone the country.

Oh yes! The Mexico Tourism Board has just finished a scale reproduction of the the ancient Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza in Second Life … another sim to add to my growing list of places to visit.

You should come too - drop me a line. I’d be happy to show people around in Second Life, and there are parts of it that really are worth seeing, you know …

If you’ve been waiting for me to make a post about Second Life that genuinely intersects with the world of science fiction, your moment has just arrived.

3pointD reports that a gentleman who goes by the name Dalian Hansen in SL is due to release a novel set almost entirely in Second Life, Linden Labs’ virtual world. As they provide no link to the source (it was a personal tip-off, apparently), I shall snip Dalian’s description/synopsis from the 3pointD announcement:

“Ben Tao is the avatar of a fired programmer who hacks Second Life. His goal is to profit from a false intellectual property claim. However, instead of changing the creation date for the items he has stolen, he is actually sending them back in time to the creation of the 3D world. This software exploit opens a wormhole of conflicting realities that unfold in a disjointed nightmare. Ben quickly finds himself controlled by an entity who robs him of all free will. Or is he just going insane? As the digital and real worlds merge in his mental interchange, he uncovers a secret that affects all of humanity. From this bleak future, Ben has only one chance to escape.”

Well, nothing groundbreaking there, at least from an sf-nal storytelling angle. After all, cyberspace was named in ink-and-paper fiction way back in 1984 thanks to Bill Gibson, the concept was arguably being kicked around before that, and there’s been plenty of recent (and forthcoming) novels dealing with virtual worlds and MMOs.

What’s important is that this book is set in a real, extant metaverse platform - if that synopsis is to be believed, it explicitly names Second Life as the arena of action. Whether or not that will encourage people who might not have bothered with ’some sci-fi rubbish’ to read it remains to be seen … as does Linden Labs’ reaction to having what I assume is a trademark being used in such a way.

What also remains to be seen is whether it’s any good, in novelistic terms. A swift google of the name Dalian Hansen reveals that the man behind the avatar is “[a]n internationally award winning photographer based in Asia”, and an experienced virtual business boffin to boot … but that tells us nothing of whether or not he can write for toffee.

The 3pointD report quotes Hansen as saying that:

“… preview editions will be published as a prim book in SL and as a paperback available from CafePress.com, both due July 7, with a hardcover edition available on Amazon.com as of July 27 …”

It also makes the point that neither Amazon or Cafepress have a listing for the item in question as of yet (and hence is hesitant to report the news as a definite). So I think we can assume it’s a self-publishing job … but again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be any good. I get the feeling that Hansen is the type who wants to lead with virtual business methods, so maybe it’s as much a proof-of-concept as anything else.

But there’s only one way to find out for certain, and that’s to go straight to the horse’s mouth. So I shall be attempting to get in touch with Av. Hansen in SL later tonight, to see if he’d like to talk about this further.

We move away from photos of plants (and, indeed, from actual photos taken with an actual camera) for this week’s FPB, because … well, because I’ve not taken any. So instead, here’s a snapshot of me checking out an air kraken in Babbage Square, Second Life:

I went to see Babbage because it was one of the places Warren Ellis mentioned in his column about ‘awesome builds that seem like ghost-towns’. A fair assessment, too - Babbage is a beautifully made steampunk-themed sim, but it was dead as a Victorian doornail when I went there, except for a few other people who’d obviously had the same idea about following Mr. Ellis’s list of suggestions. That flying squid just had to be photographed. You can buy your own, too. Second Life is like that.

***

Even that screen shot is from over a week ago, too - time has been short, and SL exploration has to, by necessity, be one of the first casualties of temporal triage. I think my keyboard is starting to resent the ceaseless battering - it keeps sighing whenever I sit down in front of it.

Of course, I could be making all this up, couldn’t I? Yakking on about how busy I am in an attempt to make you all think I’m something I’m not? Well, I might be trying to convince you I’m a more professional and successful writer than I really am, but I assure you that I’ve been working. In fact, I have the proof.

I pointed earlier in the week to my critique of Mike Resnick’s Starship: Pirate at SF Site (and in doing so proved the axiom of the Summon Author spell), so you already knew about that. But I write about music too, you know - and a whole lot of my stuff has gone live on the intarwebs in the last week.

For Subba-Cultcha.com, I have reviewed albums by Dungen (trippy), Azalea City Penis Club (interesting), and Blacktop Mourning (by-the-numbers emo pop). Plenty more stuff already submitted but yet to be published.

For Pennyblack Music, I have reviewed albums by the Young Gods (mind-blowingly brilliant industrial) and Malkovich (craftily nihilistic Dutch metal lunacy), an EP by Silicon Vultures (very promising but as yet unpolished), and live shows from Pelican (supported by These Arms are Snakes) and Clutch (supported by The Sword). Here too, at least as many pieces again still pending publication. And I still need to write up and submit my interview with Franz from the Young Gods that I recorded on Tuesday …

Plus I’m off to review Biffy Clyro and supports on Sunday night, and on June 2nd I get to interview the mighty desert rock heroes, Fu Manchu! OK, so I don’t get paid for any of this, but it’s great fun and great portfolio. If I can just work out how to survive on three hours sleep a night, I’ll be doing brilliantly. And there’s paid work in the offing, too - I’ve got my first test copywriting assignment for the Sea Your History project to work on. I have to boil down the Admiralty’s attitudes and approaches to naval dis- and re-armament in the inter-war years … to 500 words! Yipes!

***

So, incoming materials for the week are all magazines (because I only count items that I intend to read, which invalidates the latest batch of teen vamp-shagging novels from Orbit … the public library will be more grateful for them, I expect):

• Obsessed with Pipework poetry quarterly (Spring 2007)
• Locus Magazine (May 2007)
• Interzone #210

Hell knows when I’ll get time to read them, though, because I’ve also received the recommended reading list for the SF Criticism Masterclass next month - and it’s … well, it’s extensive. It’s also almost entirely made up of articles from learned tomes of crit that I have little or no chance of getting hold of, so it’s lucky that the SF Foundation’s library can supply me with copies of the relevant articles and extracts. I don’t think I’ll be doing much reviewing of books this month, that’s for sure.

Oh, and talking of reviewing and Interzone, I think I can now safely reveal that I have just become Assistant Reviews Editor for Interzone, which is something I’m inordinately proud to announce. I think it’ll be a lot of work, but well worth it for the prestige alone. How I will manage to eventually fill the wonderful Sandy Auden’s shoes, I have no idea, but I’m going to give it the best shot I have.

***

So, there you go. I really have had a busy week - not that you ever doubted me, of course, but I like to be able to back up my assertions occasionally. But now that I have shared the wonder that is my week-to-week existance with you, good people of the internet, it is time. It is time for That Thing Which Must Be Consumed On A Friday … I’ll need the calories to keep me at my desk all weekend, if nothing else!

Have a good one, boys and girls.

More metaversal antics from the world of books  - GalleyCat reports on publishers getting to grips with Second Life. Random House are going for the local library feel by starting a book discussion group for readers - with plans to get authors all av’d up and rolled out for digital meet-and-greets at some point down the line.

Transworld, however, seem to know the value of a good flame war. They’re screening a looped video of Richard ‘God Delusion’ Dawkins in-world talking about his latest controversial opus, and

“[o]utside the auditorium, Transworld have built two message walls, one for supporters of Dawkins’ thesis and one for the dissenters.”

That’ll be an interesting location to check out for the duration of the screenings, I’m thinking. Nothing like a faith fight to set the blood pressures soaring.

***

Meanwhile, The Guardian has been chatting to Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden) about Second Life, the runaway universe he has created. They try to draw him out on some hot topics, but he stays pretty cool under fire:

“TG: You are running a real economy but it is essentially a dictatorship, one headed by you, Philip Linden - as you are known in SL - the dictator.

PR: Yes, but it is a subtle question. If a country establishes a record of repossessing land for no real reason, then that colours the extent to which it’s a dictatorship. We haven’t done that. Could we shut the servers down if we get pissed off with somebody? Yes, we could do that but we haven’t and I think it is very unlikely that we will because it would so risk everything we have built.”

And on the porn issue?

“TG: I understand that porn is the biggest part of the economy.

PR: I don’t think it’s the biggest, but it’s hard to tell. Some of the transactions are person to person and some are transactions from vending machines. Sometimes the transactions have some text that allows us to tell what it is but people are so inventive that we don’t always know.”

As if being based on porn did any harm to the original internet! For a guy who’s currently under fire from the press (and constantly under fire from his user base) he deals with PR pretty smoothly. But the sooner the open-source iterations of the software get going, the safer a position he’ll be in - talking a good game is fine, but pretending to be deaf has never helped any business. SL has some serious operational problems, and its regular population are getting very annoyed by being continually fobbed off with filigree while the bugs go unsquashed.

***

That’s not stopping people developing it as a platform for more than hyper-real kinky antics and combat sims, though. TerraNova has an interview with Rebecca Nesson, who is using SL as a platform environment for distance learning classes that have previously been run on websites and via email:

“I think that the Second Life had quite a lot of advantages for people. One of the main things is that Second Life really allowed us to create a sense of class community — something that develops fairly naturally in a face-to-face class. So students appeared at class and had that chance to meet each other, something that rarely, if ever, happens in distance education classes [using] previous technologies. And that helped keep students engaged in the class.”

Think about that for a second, and bear in mind the flood of overseas students that come to the UK (or the US) to be educated. That’s not a cheap proposition for, say, a Chinese or Korean family, even a well-off one. A virtual platform like SL could become a much cheaper way of getting the same education - why fly half-way round the globe when you can just log on to your PC for four or five hours a day? The world is getting flatter - and I don’t mean geographically.

***

And, as I keep saying, this will effect authors eventually. The effects of the internet and the Long Tail are already causing fundamental changes to the lives of independent musicians, for example:

“Along the way, [Jonathan] discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.”

I know a lot of writers resist the temptations of blogging for exactly that reason, and it’s a logical approach. Whether or not that invisibility will hinder their career (because nothing gets Google juice like blogging regularly) or help it (will an air of mystery have a cachet of cool in a transparent world?) remains to be seen.

But see it we will - and Second Life (or something like it) will be the next step on from this, as Jason Stoddard suggests. New formats for a new era, perhaps?

That’s the question being asked here and there on the intarwebs at the moment, after a story appeared in a Belgian newspaper claiming that police in Brussels are beginning an investigation into allegations of a rape that occured in Second Life.

I’m no lawyer, nor am I an ethicist, and I don’t claim to have an answer one way or the other. But the fact that we can even be asking such a question is fascinating; the walls between the real world and the virtual - what Edward Castronova calls the ‘permeable membrane’ - are becoming increasingly thin and easy to cross, and the legal machinery is going to take a long time to catch up.

I like to use the ‘Wild West’ metaphor, describing MMOs like Second Life in terms of new frontiers where new experimental ways of life can take place, thanks to the relative lawlessness that prevails. It’s a double-edged sword, as the virtual rape case demonstrates, but these spaces are test beds for the social systems of the future.

Of course, much like there was in the American West, there is pressure on the people benefitting most from the expansion into new territories to police the anarchic goings-on. Which is probably why Linden Labs has announced their intent to exclude SL users from ‘Adult’ content in-world unless they can provide evidence of their legal majority … though the fact that the enforcement of non-adult content in a region labelled as such is to be left as the responsibility of the landholder leaves them a neat get-out clause for when something goes wrong. Every lazy sherriff needs a box-full of deputy badges.

Who says men can’t multitask? While working on some reviews last night, I was also hanging out at a music festival in a dusty junkyard.

As you’ve probably guessed, Scorched Earth (the music festival in question) took place in Second Life, so it was easier for me to work and hang out than it would have been at the fields-and-tents type of gig. That’s yours truly on the far left, stood on the pile of slagged tyres.

The venue was The Junkyard, on a patch of land just south of my own virtual pied-a-terre. The Junkyard is the second of the two sims that make up The Wastelands, a post-apocalyptic themed RPG sim. As a casual visitor to Second Life, I was utterly repelled by the shiny bling-ness of the mainland, so when I finally found somewhere that fitted with my own rather grungy and wrecked aesthetic tastes, I settled there immediately.

To tell the truth, most of the music wasn’t really to my taste. Paranoid Foundation specialised in a sort of droning beatless elctronica, complete with mumbled ketamine vocals, and the Redzone DJ set was fairly murky also - I felt the absence of drums and guitars quite keenly, rock fan that I am. Bela Emerson was a rare act, however - one girl, one cello, and a whole bunch of effects pedals. 

Her music was a landscape of sculpted and sampled bass tones, jittering and looping around themselves, building up and collapsing into nothingness. Again, not my normal thing, but intriguing. It’s good to step out of the musical comfort zone once in a while. It certainly fitted the ambience of the sim!

To be quite honest though, a large part of the festival’s appeal was the chance to hang out with some of my virtual neighbours, and some visiting oddballs from other places in SL. The Wastelands isn’t a clubby sim, or prone to events that attract large groups of people. It’s a quiet neighbourhood, really (unless a fight breaks out over a good piece of salvage), and it’s rare you get many more than five or six people chatting together at any one time. Scorched Earth acted as a nexus, though, and so it ended up being a bit of a social more than anything else, at least for me:

What interests me most about this sort of event is their potential. They’re very clunky at the moment; SL is far from being a mature piece of software, and the streaming of audio and video is still a fairly arcane process that relies as much on luck and the alignments of planets than any skill with code. But give it a couple of years (and an open-source peer-to-peer version of the SL server software), and you’re going to see virtual festivals that will make Burning Man look like the Teddy Bear’s Picnic.

I mean, look at that picture above; that’s a dolphin at the left edge. When was the last festival at which you saw a flying dolphin wearing flourescent beads on its tail while talking about the finer points of electronic manipulation of cello tones? And what had you ingested to achieve such a state?

Welcome to Second Life; the frontier of an unevenly distributed future.

Following on from my mention of the Dune Project roleplay sim in Second Life, here’s an article on New World Notes that talks about another roleplay sim that looks far and away better developed, coded and styled:

[Image lifted from original article at New World Notes blog; please contact if removal is required.]

“There’s a pretty elaborate backstory to CoLA , but to sum up: you are playing in a world that saw the Apocalypse but forgot to die. Most of humanity is wiped out, undead, mutated or cursed. As a role-player you get a nice spread of species to choose from, so no matter what mood you’re in, we have you covered.”

Much like the Dune Project, it looks a little too hardcore for me - I left my roleplay days behind long ago, not through any sense of shame but through lack of time to devote to them. But it’s interesting to see these things develop - sure, there are plenty of MMORPGs out there, but the way that Second Life can act as an adaptable host platform for a multitude of different user-created games is nothing short of unique. When the server code goes open-source and peer-to-peer, things are going to get very strange very quickly.