It feels SO good to be back and I am SOOOO glad I am out of the hospital, but this week has made me realize that I am far from 100%  There are SOOOO many things that I would love to blog right now, but it seems like I just cannot get things moving as quickly as I would like.  I started these pics a couple of weeks ago and am just now getting them posted.  I had THREE looks put together and ready to shoot and just did NOT feel well enough to take a picture. . . . :/  So now I am left wondering if I should just scrap these three looks and move on with new things?  SOOO many posts    . . .so little time.

My time spent on the grid was not totally worthless however.  I was “gently” reminded by one of the creators that I used to blog for, that I need to blog for fun.  I used to take blogging really seriously. . .and I still fight the urge.  When I started blogging in earnest, I stopped wearing things (for the most part) from stores that were no longer up and running, simply because I felt that there were so many creators that were struggling to make a living in SL for me to be able to wear something from them. . .advertising THEIR creations because they “needed” me.  I remember contacting an, at the time “new” creator to ask her if she would like for me to blog for her.  I LOVED her stuff, she was EXTREMELY talented and I WANTED to help her get her shop up and running and I thought she “needed” me to help her.  I WANTED to blog to help creators.  A LOT of their creations I bought, some were given to me as review copies and some I (gasps) yes. . .asked for.

But one thing I have learned and have had stressed to me over and over. . .I am NOT needed.  In fact, in many cases I am not even really wanted and I have had some creators TOLERATE me, at best.  So I have had to learn to respond to those creators that really DO want me to blog. . .and guess what . . .BLOG THEIR STUFF!   And enjoy myself while I do it!

So I am going to start that by modeling this beautiful evening “lounge wear” from PurpleMoon.  PurpleMoon has ALWAYS impressed me and I have seen BEAUTIFUL creations come out WEEKLY, whether it be hair, accessories, boho, evening wear or nails.  I can always find something beautiful to buy from PurpleMoon.  Their group gifts are amazing and you can always find items on sale, allowing you to build up a really NICE inventory of beautiful clothes!

This LOVELY skin is from Izzie Button.  It is one of her relatively newer skins (I think there have been 3-4put out since this one).  But it is REALLY lovely, comes in bunches of skin tones and I am working on a new post to really showcase it.  Thank you, Izzie for your kindness and patience. . . :)

I am truly grateful for the TONS of friends and SL creators that ARE wonderful and gracious, kind and patient.  Thank you so much for treating me like a real person, even when you’ve had a bad day!  Hugs and kisses to you.  I am looking forward to working with all of you. . . .until later. . .

STYLING NOTES

*Dress: :: PurpleMoon ::- Bed of Roses Mesh Dress in Purple/Teal Size A
*Skin and Makeup: Izzie’s - Cassandra Skin sunkissed DB, Cassandra Eyeshadow purple,Lipgloss rose (p+sk)
*Hair:  Alli & Ali- April Hair Brown-Blonde
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -38- Classy
*Jewelry and Nails: Finesmith Designs  NailsL 20 Rave Indigo, Organic necklace, earrings and ring -Turquoise
Shoes: R2 Fashion- “mele” Turquoise blue
*Eyes: IKON- Utopia Eyes – Light Bahama Green (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

I’m 32 years old, so it feels pretentious if I start writing about my Deep Insights Into Life ‘N Things™, but lately, things have gotten to a point at which I have to just stop and think about what I’m really doing. Because honestly, life is really bloody hard, and I’m in a funny state of mind that I can’t make much heads or tails of.

The one thing I can probably really definitely say is, I’m stressed. I’m stressed a lot. I have to provide for 6 people, and I’m really the only one earning any kind of money, and while I love being creative and “artistic”, I never imagined I would ever generate any significant amount of income from that, so I picked a job that’s safe enough to live off and convenient enough to allow me to work from home and have time and opportunity to do the things I really love. I’m a court enforcement officer, a bailiff. (Those not from the European Union might want to have a look at wikipedia, since it’s quite different on other parts of the world.) Unfortunately it’s also a very high stress job, which I really didn’t realize at first. I’m an intuitive thinker, which means that my emotions and perceptions are unconscious, and thus mostly unknown to me. I simply cannot tell when something affects me emotionally, until it becomes unbearable, so for a long time I can just go along as if everything is fine, until being overwhelmed by my own emotions. Thus, it took me 32 years to realize there is actually something like emotional stress, and that it’s a bitch.

Dealing with negative things on a daily basis, and never being welcome is a bad way to start on a job. On top of that, there’s the fact of receiving no gratification ever, since nobody’s really ever happy with what I’m doing, by definition. People don’t like being pressed to pay their bills (especially since they mostly can’t pay their bills, otherwise I wouldn’t get involved), and creditors aren’t happy that their bills aren’t paid from the offset, so I’m in a position where I can make nobody happy. Also, since I’m not privately employed, I can’t choose which work to do and which not to do; I have to take every job, as long as it meets the legal requirements, even though there’s certain institutions I really don’t want to do dirty business for (banks, I’m looking at you). Finally, there’s no support from the administrative side that oversees us; they usually get involved when something goes wrong (to which the sanction of choice is the instruction to remedy the error) and other times very happily ignores us. And while this seems like the perfect breeding ground for burnout, I’m actually not burnt out.

I sleep very well (actually somewhat more than usually, but that may just be because I allow myself to get 10 hours of sleep a day now), I don’t drink, smoke, or take drugs, I don’t detach from my loved ones or my pastimes of choice, and my sexual libido is just fine. Rather, I’m avoiding anything work-related, I’m way behind on things I need to do, which makes everything on my desk pretty urgent at this point. Still, I’m writing this, for example. I’m not really anxious either, or  depressed. I do get moments of depression when I think about the things I have to do, but mostly, I’m just fine. All I have is this job I absolutely don’t want to do right now.

And so I’m thinking, reflecting and analyzing, because that’s my natural way to deal with things like that, and I’m just not getting to any conclusion. It might just be that this is midlife crisis come early. Or it might be I’ve just found the one job in all the world I absolutely shouldn’t do. Or I’m just a lazy bum. And as I fail to come to any conclusion about this, I also can’t think of any solution either, which is actually the part that’s worst, since I’m all about practical solutions. “Get a different job” would be the most obvious one, but that’s really out of the question. I’ve got a highly specialized field of expertise that’s bloody useless in any other environment, and things are hard enough for real good creatives, so there’s no way I can earn anything from my amateurish shenanigans. Also, it’s pretty late in the game for a career change, with mortgages to pay and mouths to feed. All of this wouldn’t account for much, though, if only I could think of a job that I’d rather do, which has been a problem for all of my life – there just isn’t anything that sounds appealing to me.

And so, I’m pretty stuck with my useless thoughts and analytics. It’s at times like these when my partner is at her best, with her absolute devotion and wisdom. If you have never experienced it, you won’t really understand, but there’s simply nothing like the one person that understands you at your deepest level. Just like negative emotions, I experience love only when it’s become unbearable, and I can definitely say: I love you, El.

Happy Valentine’s everyone.

STYLING NOTES

OUTFIT: R.icielli – PIETRA bodysuit /beige, BEATRIZ sequined miniskirt /gold
SHOES: R.icielli – CARMELIA pumps base
*HAIRBASE:  A&A Tattoo Layer Hairbase Darkblonde
*HAIR: A&A Marcella Hair Darkblonde
LASHES: *REDGRAVE*  -38- Classy
NAILS: Finesmith Designs – METALLIC
EARRINGS: R.icielli - BRIGITTE earrings /quartz L
SHOES: R.icielli – CARMELIA pumps/Crema
SKIN: Ricielli – ESMEE medium_DB/makeup4
*EYES:  IKON ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Deep Lagoon (L)
*POSES: PurplePoses

Now the new explanation includes not only the level of realism of the visual elements, but also the relation to the narrative, and with all due respect, I don’t think that’s helpful either. Thing is: I wasn’t creeped out by The Polar Express, or any other animated movie ever, and I really don’t think Polar Express (or the newly featured Tintin movie) look particularly realistic either. I recently played L.A. Noire, which looks and feels much more realistic than any animated movie I’ve ever watched (or many other recent 3D titles, such as GTA 4, The Witcher 2, Skyrim, etc.) and that’s not because I’m controlling the action, but because they are more realistic. Heck, Tintin or Polar Express don’t even aim at being super-realistic, they’re fictional fantasy stories, one even based on a comic book series. If anything, they aim to be modern comic book movies.

In a talk that we recently featured here, Prof. Jeremy Bailenson discusses the uncanny valley shortly (at ca. 1 hours 7 minutes in) and describes it as a “mismatch between how realistic it looks, and how realistic it behaves”, which, in my book, is a much better explanation than “narrative” or just “magic”. As long as we don’t expect things to be realistic, there’s really nothing uncanny about them; or rather: As long as The Polar Express is a fictional story about a kid riding to the north pole in search of Santa, and acts like a kid in a fictional story riding to the north pole in search of Santa, and on top of that looks like a fictional character in a 3d animated movie, there’s really no mismatch there.

And while I was at it, I finally played a little more with Viewer 3 and took a look at what all that fuzz with Mesh is about, and fell down a rabbit hole and haven’t found my way back yet. I knew before that mesh would be a game changer. That is, I knew it conceptually, like you know that a federated network of interconnected grids (the hypergrid) will be a game changer. But after I uploaded my first mesh, it already changed the game for me:

Not only are meshes much more detailed and diverse than anything you could do with sculpts and prims, they are also much more ubiquitous, since we can start drawing from the non-SL 3D-community as well. There’s tons of resources of free 3D meshes on the web, which can easily converted to collada for use in OpenSim, and in addition to that, meshes can also be created more easily once you get the hang of some basic 3D software. So really, the metaverse of the coming years will look very different from the metaverse we know today.

STYLE NOTES

*Dress: ::VMC:: -  Sibelle – Blue
Shoes: [ glow ] studio -  Nite Nite Pumps silver
*Nails:  +:+WTG+:+  - **French** nail
*Hair: A&A - Melrosa Hair Blackberry
*Jewelry: Addiction – Rejoice Diamond Bracelet, Earrings, Necklace
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -31- ExtraLong
Skin: Style by Kira - Emma Skin 01J
*Eyes: FASHISM -  ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Azure (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

This video is licensed under a creative commons non-commercial share-alike license. (Download)

Credits, as promised:

Years of Rice and Salt (cc-by-sa)
Yunus (cc-by-sa)
ТЕЛЬНЮК: Сестри (cc-by-nc-sa)
trustno1 (cc-by-nc-sa)

OpenSim
Linden Lab
Creative Commons
Hypergrid Business
AM Radio
Ina Centaur

Silk Dreams
WTG
Style by Kira
Purrfect 10
Fashism
Calico Ingman Creations
Alli & Ali
aDiva Couture
Finesmith Designs
Rockberry
siss boom
Logo & Kin
Earthstones
Vero Modero
Purple Moon
R.icielli
Essences
YS&YS
Fallen Gods
Barerose
Redgrave’s
Akeruka
Kalnins Footwear
Somnia
Addiction

Oglaf

STYLING NOTES

Gown: Elemiah Design – Moon – bodice, skirt, handbag
*Hair: A&A -  Mae Hair Lightbrown
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -39- Luscious
*Jewelry and nails (including rings): FINESMITH – Isabella earrings, Necklace, Finesmith Metallic Nails
*Skin: Akeruka -  Kia 16 Tan
*Eyes: FASHISM – ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Egyptian Blue (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

(Background images for the pictures provided by: ecathe and Cybrea respectively…courtesy of Deviant Art.)

I recently got a tablet, or rather, what they nowadays call a tablet. It’s actually a portable computer which, other than a laptop, mainly consists of a touchscreen, which is both output and input device. I guess this description fits any tablet computer.

It’s a WeTab, marketed in other parts of the world as the ExoPC Slate. The first thing I did was, of course, play with it, and see what it can do. I’m lying, that’s of course not the first thing I did, but it makes for a better narrative. Truth be told, the first thing I did was research, looking into a lot of different tablets, what they can do, how they function, and which might be closest to what I really want to do with it. That’s the kind of process I go through with every major purchase (major being “more than 100 €”) I’m doing, and it’s surprisingly hard most of the time. I grew up in an era when computers were measured in MHz of CPU, and MB of RAM, and screen sizes of inches, and it was pretty easy to determine that your 486 DX2 66 was faster than someone’s 486 DX 40, and way faster than someone elses’s 386 33. Today, that’s not quite clear, as computers come in a myriad of configurations, and you’d need to look into every single one of them and weigh them against one another. What’s better, an ATI Radeon 5770 or an NVidia GeForce 340? Does the i3 really have that much more performance that it will justify to switch there from a core 2 duo? Would I even need it?

It gets worse when different OSs are involved, as these in themselves have up- and downsides as well. The iPad is cool, but there’s some really snappy Android tablets out there. What’s with that buss about the Samsung Galaxy tablets? It doesn’t help that clever marketing departments decided to treat new devices no longer as “computers”, but as if they’re some kind of species on their own. And I admit, I would’ve fallen for it, if I wouldn’t have heard about the WeTab early this year, when the iPad was all the rage, and the WeTab was announced as the “iPad killer” (just because it was one of the few products that was actually advanced enough to come out on the tablet market in time to rival the iPad). What the WeTab promised, was something different. It’s as if the manufacturer’s understood that there was no way they could compete with the iPad by offering just a tablet that was “like the iPad”, they sought to differentiate themselves from it by designing the WeTab diametrically opposite of the iPad. Instead of a closed system it could be tinkered with. Instead of offering little options for peripherals, it came with a standard SD slot, 2 USB ports and an HDMI port. And instead of running closed software, the WeTab OS was a Linux distro.

Now, I liked that, concept-wise, and when the WeTabs sold for around 300€ used on Amazon, I got one. This is where the playing around part started. I found that, since it was running Linux, I could indeed install any Linux application I wanted, which was some break from the marketplace/app store lock-in I’m used from other tablets and phones. But it was only when I changed the Operating System to Windows 7 that I understood that this tablet was in fact nothing special, or new, but just another computer, with a touchscreen. That, indeed, all tablets, smartphones, eBook readers, etc. are just computers.

So why aren’t we treating them as such? Why aren’t we using a smartphone the way we want to? Why can’t we just remove things like Carrier IQ by deleting them? Why can’t we install regular OSX applications on an iPad. Indeed, why does an iPad need its own OS at all? (The iOS is based on OSX anyway.)

It turns out, the answer is not technical, but the jumbled mess of politics/economics/marketing which dominates most of today’s inventions, but I’ll leave it to Mr. Doctorow to provide an answer here. Suffice to say that it made me determined to try to use devices which let me treat them as a general computational device and allow me to run and change the software and hardware I want to, on my own risk, of course. Sadly, that limits the options of devices severely. But then, at least there are options.

First off, let’s talk about the different uses of communication. One of the advantages of social networks is the publicness of communication. If there’s something you like to share with the world, or with a (specified or unspecified) group of people, using them is certainly a big advantage over using email. They’re convenient to use, instantly published and updated in real time. Conversations are open for others to join in and visible to anyone. The fact that facebook, google+ & co. uses it to tailor advertisements to you (by spying on your conversations) shouldn’t be a drawback for the whole technology, as there’s other social networking tools anyone can install for themselves that are free of spying. The real disadvantage, however, is non-public, private communication. Because even though private messages shouldn’t easily be visible to other users of the service, they will nonetheless still be spied on by the service itself, and are, of course, easily visible to any operator of the service.

Email, on the other hand, has always been a tool for private communication. Sometimes, even very sensitive information, like passwords, product keys, bank data, etc. are sent via email. It’s all the more bad that most people handle email today like they handle social networking: By signing up to an online Email service, and accessing their emails through the webmail service on their website.

Why is this bad?

The way email works, your emails are stored in plain text in a simple subfolder on the server of the service provider. This means that anyone working for the service provider has unfiltered access to all your emails. What’s more, they may even be oblieged to give out your email conversations to governmental, or sometimes even private, organizations upon request. Now, you’d think that there needs to be some pretty strong reason for requests like that, like some court order or something, but in reality, the major email providers get and grant a lot more requests on grounds of much more flexible laws such as the Patriot Act. What’s even worse, the Electric Communications Privacy Act specifies that any communication stored for more than 6 months on the server of a service provider can be obtained by governmental agencies with as little effort as simply stating it’s “relevant to a criminal investigation”. True, this is just relevant for the USA, but how many of the major email providers are situated there?

Finally, beyond the danger of access from third parties, there’s the danger of losing your communication. Just like social networks, Email providers can shut down as well, taking all your messages with them, or ban you from their service, with the same effect. If you only used the webmail service to read and write emails, you don’t even have a copy of them on your harddrive.

What can you do?

First off, if you don’t already do so, use an email client software! Due to the ubiquity of webmail services, many people assume that email is just another part of the World Wide Web, when indeed they’re something entirely different (and much older) than that. Email communication works independently of the WWW, and email clients can handle it for you regardless of webmail services. The advantages here are for you to always have at least one copy of your emails on your own computer.

This doesn’t adress privacy issues, of course; the danger of others accessing your email against your will is still there. So the next best thing to do is certainly to run your own email server. This sounds harder than it is. Most website hosting companies throw in email services as part of the bundle, and these usually start at 1$ per month. Yes, it costs money, but hey: 12 $ a year for your own domain, custom email adress, ad-free and under your control? You certainly could spend your money worse.

Even better, you can run your email server from home. While technically your regular computer would be sufficient for that task, in order to make it efficient it would have to be online and running 24/7, so a better solution would be to run a low-energy homeserver. The sheeva/guru plug and the Excito bubbas are two neat solutions that come with both webserver and email server built in. And they stay in your home, where nobody can access them against your will short of a search warrant.

Finally, to counter interception of your emails when they’re sent, or from the server of the recipient, there’s encryption. Encrypting your email will not prevent it from being intercepted, but for anyone without the correct keys (which only you and the recipient should have), your email is a senseless jumble of numbers and characters, that are impossible to decrypt. PGP is an email client extension, and is included or available as a plugin for most of the popular email clients available.

What I’m doing

I’m running a Bubba 2 at home, for the most sensitive emails, and  run my own dedicated server (the one this website runs on) for mundane email communication. I’ve had my own email since almost 8 years now (tgib.co.uk was registered in 2004) and don’t regret a single day. For social networking I’m using a combination of status.net/twitter/plurk and some specialized communities (like OpenSim Creations) I can trust. I’m not a member of facebook, myspace, google+ or similar ones.