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Eloise Pasteur

Serendipitous Sex - Eloise's thoughts and fancies - 0 views

eloisepasteur.net/...index.php

Second Life sex adult invention creativity

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 23 May 09 - Cached
  • My contention is simple - when we're in Second Life to work, we can use the same techniques we use in first life to focus on the task at hand rather than that gorgeous avatar. If we want, later, to consensually jump that avatar's virtual bones (to be deliberately somewhat crude) and they are interested too, then just like flirting in the office, we can run off together and do this. However, if we're in a space that forbids this - Lively I'm remembering you here, but not only you - there is that allure of the forbidden, the censored, the naughty. People can, and will, work around the limitations in some quite amazingly inventive ways. Knowing it's not forbidden lets us (as a group) apply that energy and creativity to the task at hand when we're working, and apply it to the avatar at hand when we're not - in much the same way we learn how to do as adults.
  • The obvious corollary to this: if we ban sex from Second Life (which isn't the same as the current proposals about the adult continent) we switch back to a situation more like Lively where the allure of the forbidden becomes stronger. Creativity, learning and the like go down, and how long would it be until Second Life follows Lively into closure?
  • There are a range of other things too. The sex market in Second Life contains a huge amount of innovation - if people want to do sex, people will find ways to let them and support them. Whilst not every tool to support avatar sex turns into a tool to support education or business in Second Life, quite a lot (not all, but quite a lot) of the tools that you find used in education and business settings in Second Life, have their origins in the sex industry. Even when they're duplicating tools that are used in RL education/business settings, the code in Second Life is often explored and refined in the sex industry in Second Life first.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So, there you have it. Second Life, in my opinion, gains from the fact that it lets the adults play as they choose as well as work as they choose. The fact there's a market for sex toys drives innovation in Second Life, and supports the business and education communities too. Although the press would, at least sometimes, have you believe it's a playground for perverts, so is the atomic world. But I do rather suspect if you remove the sex play entirely, you remove one of the things that, whilst it draws unwelcome attention, drives Second Life to be a success.
Eloise Pasteur

Second Life offers healing, therapeutic options for users - 0 views

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi

healing second life support therapy

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 13 Jul 08 - Cached
  • poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I'd created to engage here - I was participating in an "anxiety support group" in the free, virtual world of Second Life.
  • As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!
  • No wonder analysts at Gartner, a leading technology research company, predict that three years from now 8 in 10 Internet users will work or play in virtual spaces.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • more attention to elaborate hairdos than Cher in her heyday
  • It has, in short, all the trauma and pain of real life, and some cautions are in order when it comes to seeking psychological support.
  • But maybe because it's a dream realm, hopefulness abounds. Nowhere is that truer than in Second Life's support groups, which help people cope with everything from cancer, depression, bipolar disorder and autism, to caretaker stress. There are more than 70 such groups, according to Second Life's Health Support Coalition. Most are secular. While a few groups are facilitated by associations such as the American Cancer Society, peers run most.
  • As expressed on the Web site, www.supportforhealing.com, associated with Second Life's Support for Healing Island, "we are NOT and never will replace the help of professionals ... but purely hold a safe place for people to come when they need a shoulder."
  • A year ago, before I had explored Second Life, I would have laughed at the idea of virtual shoulders. How can a person possibly be "real" via an avatar anyway - much less have a meaningful conversation with a puppy dog, barmaid, elf, or wilder avatar appearance such as a blob or a tree? It's hard enough to trust someone in real life, much less "second life." Then again, what better place to connect our yearning selves with other yearning selves than in a space of mutual creation - a place where those very selves can be one's unconscious made manifest? Indeed, avatar, in its original Sanskrit, refers to the descent of the soul in human form. Click, clack: When I rose from my hourlong anxiety group meeting, I felt seen and heard in the deepest part of me - more so, in fact, than in some "real life" interactions, where we often put up fronts.
  • The anonymity of Second Life can make all the difference in opening up to share within a support group. Somewhere in small-town America, a wife and mother of about 40 - she could be your neighbor or relative - suffers from serious depression. She loves animals, so within Second Life, as Fionella Flanagan, she's a big gray dog with a shaggy white mane. She attends the depression support group. Why does she do it? "I don't have to worry about what I say in the group coming back to bite me in my home town."
  • She also suffers from fibromyalgia, one of those crippling, invisible diseases that some doctors say is "all in your head." In Second Life, Fionella doesn't "have to overcome real life prejudice when I say I'm sick. There's none of that, 'but you look so good' junk."
  • When anxiety support group avatars were asked whether they were more honest as avatars than in real life, a wild-haired blonde, Galvana Gustafson (in real life an American, dancer and bassoonist with a master's degree in psychotherapy), put it this way: "My avatar is more honest than myself because the rejection won't hurt as much."
  • "All of Second Life is my support group," she reported.
  • Morgana later discovered the Support for Healing Island "because I was going through a major relapse with my bipolar and needed help from people who understood. I personally like to be in groups that are survivors, sufferers, and caretakers and loved ones, supporting one another. The best help and advice I have ever gotten are from people who have experienced firsthand."
  • People with autism or Asperger's especially seem to appreciate Second Life.
  • Researchers of autism use Second Life as a laboratory and tool. At the in-world SL-Labs and Teaching and Research facility, at the University of Derby in England, Simon Bignell, a lecturer in psychology, studies how Second Life can "enhance first life social-communication skills in people" with autistic spectrum disorders. The Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas, Dallas, offers a therapy in Second Life for people with Asperger's that helps them practice interviewing for jobs.
  • Second Life's Health Support Coalition (a collaboration between Soj, the avatar Gentle Heron and Carolina Keats, who in real life is a medical librarian) has won a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to create an Ability Commons, for 40-plus smaller health and support groups. "Imagine a paralyzed 23-year-old lying in his family's back bedroom," the coalition wrote, "yearning for contact with age peers in similar situations. Second Life offers people with serious physical and cognitive disabilities opportunities to socialize and get information."
  • opens each meeting with disclaimers: "Please do not let these meetings take the place of professional help," he typed to us.
  • One in-world psychologist, Dr. Craig Kerley from Georgia, who was profiled on CBS's "Early Show," has hung his shingle for "cybertherapy" at $90 per hour. This work, he says, "can be valuable for those who have limited choices in their geographical region, have limited time to drive to regular in-person appointments, have limited mobility, and have limitations in their lifestyle that make traveling to a brick and mortar office difficult."
  • Still, Dr. Peter Yellowlees, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UC Davis and a specialist in virtual worlds, cautions about therapy in Second Life, even with professionals. He advises using it only as "a potential adjunct to face-to-face therapy," and to "use passwords or other cues in Second Life to make sure you're talking to the right person" - the real therapist, not scammers posing as one.
  • Yellowlees uses Second Life as a teaching tool, not for therapy. His Virtual Hallucinations sim gives "the lived experience of schizophrenia - to hear voices and see visions" so his students (and the rest of us) can "get inside the head, just a bit, of someone who's psychotic." It certainly sparked empathy in me, much more richly than a mere clinical description of the disorder would have done.
  • Empathy: There's that word again, an odd one to associate with impersonal bytes and modems, but the right one. Second Life is a hot, humming thing of wire and light, a "server" - spiritual teachers would like the metaphor - that can carry community and genuine human sympathy.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 13 Jul 08
     
    Personal anecdote of seeking support in Second Life. It is written by a journalist and addresses a lot of the issues from several sides - including advice from various mental health practitioners and comments from volunteers as well as some real insight into the world of SL and relating it to the public.
Eloise Pasteur

Gwyn's Home » Not So Lively: Chronicles of Day One on Google's Virtual World - 0 views

gwynethllewelyn.net/...y-one-on-googles-virtual-world

analysis comment gwyneth llewlyn lively second life

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • (no new virtual world supports the Mac these days, in spite of the “promises” done to “support it soon” — with “only” 8% of market share and growing, the Mac is simply not interesting for developers to focus on)
    • Eloise Pasteur
      Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
       
      Not true, Small Worlds does
  • Being — like all Google products! — a Beta version, there are perhaps 40 or 50 available options (not the “millions” announced by Google reps) and they can be somewhat configured, but the choices are confusing and very, very limited.
  • “Linden Lab” room a close second. Figuring out that here I would already find a few familiar faces from Second Life®, I went for that one. The choice was certainly correct — Dusan Writer, Grace McDunnough, Jurin Juran, and likely a few others (sometimes it’s not easy to figure out who’s who!) were around in the room, testing the cumbersome interface. And cumbersome it is!
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Then again, it looked like most of the crowd was complaining about the excruciatingly painful lag.
  • Combine that with a confusing little interface and it was clearly anything but a “fun” experience. And remember that we were all cheating. Everybody on the “Linden Lab” room at that time was a veteran Second Life resident; we’re not exactly newbies with virtual worlds. We have tried several, and in some cases, use different VWs regularly and every day. We’re used to lag, to semi-functional software, to application crashes (several people crashed during the few hours I was online), to things not loading, to silly mistakes that everybody does. We’re also used to the insanely complex (but virtually rich) interface of Second Life, and use computers and their complex applications to accomplish tasks every day. And, of course, we all are very open minded and eager to try new things out.
  • Lively was anything but Lively — except for the fact that you were in a visually unappealing chatroom with a lot of friends or at least acquaintances from one’s journey across the Metaverse. Like I usually say, most virtual worlds I’ve tried only capture my attention for about 15 minutes, and it’s up to the developers to make sure that I enjoy the first 15 minutes
  • The “cartoonish” look (which is so great for rendering things quickly) is also something that baffles me. I can’t believe that Google is targeting the teen population.
  • After all, Mike Elgan from ComputerWorld claims: What that means is that companies will be able to re-create their office and meeting space, and events companies can create or re-create entire conferencing facilities. Your avatar can wander around, see the “booths,” check out the conferences or interface with other “attendees” — all in virtual space.  Really, Mike?… They might do that, but definitely not on Lively.
  • Even a MoU representative (who, as said, did create a room for a client in Lively already) considers that opinion an “interesting hypothesis”. Put into other words, not even MoU seriously believes that article, and it’s just one of a series — which, if I didn’t know the reputation of the magazines writing them, I’d just believe they were infodumps straight out of Google’s marketing department. The claims are just ludicrous.
  • If Google has more plans for Lively, they’re not telling — and instead are offering a terrible product, way below their usual offerings.
  • So why are people so enthusiastic about Google Lively? I have only one explanation: it has the brand “Google” behind it.
  • As a 3D-chatroom-embedded-on-the-web, it falls behind almost every other product and application I have tried in the past 4 years, no matter where you wish to find something good. The animations are goofy and cartoonish, to the point of extreme irritability.
  • The interface is not obvious, but then again, SL suffers from the same problem, and it’s just a question of getting used to it.
  • There is no content creation at all; no way to integrate it with anything; no programming/scripting; no chat tools (even GTalk, known to have the least features just after SL’s chat system, has far more!).
  • And, more important: no support, a terrible forum system (I can’t answer on half the threads), no helpful people around… if you bump into a Google Developer, they’re very likely very friendly (or so everybody who met them claims), but that’s all you get.
  • Google’s webpage for Lively is even more minimalistic than anything else they’ve launched before
  • And there is nothing on the Google developers’ sites either.
  • Searching for the “most popular” rooms leads to the inevitable: the most rated one was a dance club (since you can stream music) and on the top ten list you had a lot of sex-related rooms as well.
  • This was a terrible disappointment. I admit to being very naive. I was expecting something with at least the quality of Vivaty which at least has pretty decent avatars
  • but using SketchUp to import at least crude models. Even importing plywood cubes would be nice! Instead, we have to rely on the “Catalog”, created by a limited group of Google developers.
  • Some SL residents managed to talk to the Google Developers, and these said that there was a 3D Max plugin to allow the creation of content into Lively. The plugin works 90% of the time but it can only improve. There is no idea or plan or announcement on if that plugin will be released to the public.
  • Google is known to be “the company that does no evil”. But looking from my point of view — an enthusiast of the 3D Social Web — I feel cheated. We were doing great in opening the minds to millions of users to look at the Metaverse as Second Life defines it as the next human-machine interface for all our tasks. Granted, we all know it’ll take ages — another decade at least — but we all are here for the long term. Instead, what we get from one of the industry giants is that “3D is bad, embedding cartoons on Web pages is good”. Why? Well, it should be obvious. Google is the market leader in (2D) web search content — both text and images (and soon video). While there is an HTML-based World-Wide Web, Google will be a major player in it — always.
  • I don’t think there are coincidences. In about 24 hours (not in the same day for the timezone-impaired), Sun’s Wonderland gets slashdotted, Linden Lab announces the massive growth of Second Life and demonstrates the interoperability between their main grid and IBM’s OpenSim-based grid, and Google launches their own virtual world, Lively. July 8th was definitely the Day of the Metaverse!
  • So, like probably billions of people around the world, I tried to join in to Lively and see what’s all about. Not to be turned down by the lack of Mac support
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    More on Lively. Google is missing the mark
Ole C Brudvik

Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative - 0 views

www.holymeatballs.org/...st_practices_for_educatio.html

bestpractices education globalkids secondlife

shared by Ole C Brudvik on 21 Apr 07 - Cached
  • [SL] Best Practices For Education in Second Life The following best practices were developed by Global Kids, Inc. through the summer 2006 Camp GK in the teen grid of Second Life. Over four weeks, 15 teens spent three hours a day, five days a week, participating in interactive, experiential workshops about pressing global issues. Over the course of the program the teens picked a topic of concern -- child sex trafficking -- and built a maze to educate their online community and inspire them to take action. In its first eight weeks, the content-rich maze was visited by 2,500 teens, amongst whom over 450 donated money to an international organization committed to eradicating this global crime against children. Below is a review of general concepts. For more details download the pdf. Best practices for working in TSL 1. What happens in the teen grid stays in the teen grid. 2. Create multiple places of meaning. 3. If you build it, they will come. 4. Go beyond TSL. Best practices for bringing a youth development model into TSL 1. Build, build, build! 2. Don’t just build; design and manipulate avatars. 3. Think globally, act locally. 4. Know when teens know best. Best practices in workshop design and facilitation in TSL 1. Use real world content when addressing real world issues. 2. Don’t wait until someone has the floor to start typing. 3. Don’t fear multiple communication channels. 4. Incorporate processing into the activity, not just as a final step. Best practices in program design for TSL 1. Employ effective, rigorous, targeted recruitment. 2. Replace the dominant TSL culture with the GK Island culture. 3. Carefully design and build the tools required. 4. Ensure the program is designed for the recruited participants
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