I was hanging around in Second Life last night, and gatecrashed a bunch of people chatting about Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin (which I have yet to read, so I mostly listened to what everyone else was saying).

Inevitably someone brought up the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, and someone else mentioned that he’d not only been to Second Life, but been interviewed there too. The things you find out from random people that you’d have never thought to Google for, eh? So here’s a video of Vonnegut being interviewed in the metaverse.

Talking of Second Life, I’m considering buying a plot of land in The Junkyard. One just came free, and I’m looking into the financial considerations (which are quite low for a single small parcel, all things considered) before laying out some Lindens and begging Jason Stoddard and Co. to build me a cool hangout in keeping with the local ambiance …

… the local ambiance being very much post-apocalyptic, a la Mad Max. My kind of place. Pop by and visit - the locals have some diverting (and deadly) entertainments should you feel the urge to join in. Otherwise you can just wander around, chat to people and check out the scenery. And not have people try to sell you crap you don’t want, quite unlike a huge swathe of the rest of the metaverse.

Oh yeah; Warren Ellis has a new gaff in SL, which I also dropped in on. It’s called Winterstate. And being the sort of host who understands his client demographic, he’s laid on entertainment in the form of a set of zombie-infested tunnels for you to blow off steam in, should you wish - you’ll need to buy a gun elsewhere, but that’s not much of a chore. There are also little helicopters, and it snows a lot. Mr. Ellis wasn’t around at the time, regrettably.

Any VCTB-reading SL users, please friend me, because I still hardly know anyone. Just IM for Isambard Portsmouth.

It looks like Second Life, home of the weird, just got a little bit weirder. The PR agency Centric have just found their island build taken over by a rogue corporation from another timeline that has been trying to develop an alien world into a human colony. No one seems entirely sure what that means, but Winfinity, the temporally displaced company in question, is offering a bounty of L$100k to the person who goes in, scopes the scene and brings back the best report of what’s going on. I’ve been threatening to get acquainted with SL for months now - I think I just found my motivation. Any regular visitors to the metaverse care to share some tips of good places to visit?

I’ve got a few new additions in the blogroll who I thought I’d give a mention today …

Continue reading “Some introductions”

You materialise outside your house of impossible architecture, and find to your astonishment that it’s raining. It’s raining boxes. Small featureless cubes, decorated with frantically scrolling computer code, babbling pseudo-biblical gibberish as they cascade onto the landscape around you.

Continue reading “Metaverse terrorism”

“Synthetic worlds are big business. And not just for their creators – there are a growing number of people and businesses making a living in the real world by working in simulated ones. Continue reading “The Potential Of Synthetic Worlds”

Opinion is still divided over the whole ‘wisdom of crowds’ idea. But the occasional inaccuracy (and somewhat more frequent bad spelling and grammar) does nothing to deter thousands of users, including myself, who want their answers quickly and conveniently.

Continue reading “Wikipedia, communities and consensus knowledge”

If the current trends of growth in ’synthtic worlds’ such as Second Life and the multitude of MMORPGs continue, there will be a whole lot of new realities for people to explore from the comfort of their own armchairs. What future will science fiction have in an ever-expanding multiverse? Continue reading “Science fiction and the multiverse”

Ladies and gentlemen, as always, Friday at VCTB can only mean one thing - Friday Plant Blogging!

Continue reading “Friday Plant Blogging! Aloe again”

Second Life is really starting to hit the news properly now - it’s been a 1337-geek blogosphere darling for a little while, but some of the more mainstream outlets are picking it up. And as usual, they’re blowing it out of all proportion as it stands at the moment. But what about in a few decades’ time? Continue reading “A second chance at life”

The first to inhabit any new frontier are the pioneers, the early adopters. But it never takes long for the commercial interests to follow suit, seeing opportunity in the form of a space uncluttered by competitors. Continue reading “A new world of opportunities”