Taoyuan Nights

Before you read this article, I want you to watch something…Bananaphone. It’ll take a minute to load, but it’s very worthwhile.

Ok, back? Then let’s talk about Second Life. Second Life is an online virtual reality world, which appears to be inhabited by two types of person, each labouring under a terrible delusion:

• “Furries”. These are people who believe themselves to be animals trapped in a human’s body. They relieve the inner tension this causes, by creating online ‘furry animal’ personalities and doing the cyber-nasty with various other animals/furries. Yes, really.

• Journalists who are attempting to write a trendy article about Second Life, and who believe themselves to be fashionably catching the leading edge of a technology wave, but who are in fact catching the leading edge of the brown wave caused by a giant, 100ft turd slapping into the world’s biggest toilet bowl.
  

Two journalists stepping into Second Life with their freshly commissioned ‘cool’ looks, hoping for an interview that will cement their position as ‘tech journalist’, but actually about to discover how it feels to watch a giant cartoon horse forcibly violating your virtual body for two hours. (Pic: zingo)

An online world inhabited by these two types of people might not sound like fun, but when you consider that a tiny percentage of people using this ‘world simulator’ must have a sense of humour; and that some of these people also have technical skill; you can see it soon adds up to technocratic fun and hijinks. This comment, posted today on Slashdot, neatly sums up the situation.

“(PS. If you ever go into the sandboxes in Second Life, you’ll see all sorts of other types of abuse too – floating batman cubes/bananaphones which follow you around playing an annoying/catchy* loop, hundreds of stupidly high-detail models just left lying around by their long-gone creators, bendy [genitalia] which follow people around annoying them, thousands of physics objects which attempt to waste the simulator’s resources, etc.)

*delete as appropriate”

I very nearly laughed my balls off.

Wannabe-tech journalists, Second Life is nothing more than a poorly run ripoff of ‘Active Worlds’, a near-identical platform that came out *13 years ago*. Get with the program. Everyone else, here are some links to let you learn more about how incredibly wrong Second Life can be:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36509

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/03/05/john-edwards-virtual-attackers-unmasked/

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/01/ageplay_in_seco.html

First Life.