I’ve still got one Midnight Rant on my HD from… weeks ago, where I talk about copyright, and I’ll hopefully get to upload that soon as well, but there’s some more I want to talk about it that I didn’t touch on in the video. You see, I’m a bailiff (and I’m following Key Gruin’s recent move to more disclosure here) which, for people from the other side of the world (i.e. the Americas) is a mixture of Sheriff and Repo Man. In my line of work I’m dealing with questions of money and debt each and every day, and there’s a few thoughts I have that deal with both money and copyright, and this strange new world we all find ourselves in.

Because the thing with money is, it’s not just about how we earn it, but also, and maybe even more importantly, how we spend it. Or rather – for whom. While many times the product itself decides what we buy – after all, I go to Burger King because I like them better than McDonald’s – in other cases a lot of factors are coming into play. Car mechanics, for example: I don’t just want my car fixed; any mechanic probably can do that. I want it fixed without getting screwed over, without having to pay more than it’s worth, without the mechanic taking the easy route and just throwing the whole module out that’s malfunctioning and buying a new one, but employing some kind of understanding, fairness and imagination that allows them to get the job done as inexpensive and straightforward as possible. It takes a long, long time to find a mechanic like that, just as it takes a long time to find an attorney who actually shows some commitment, or a doctor who listens to what really ails you. If you find them, hold on tight and treat them good, they’re all worth more than you could ever pay them.

A similar situation appears when it comes to copyright and entertainment. Most of the money you pay for movies, music, games, books, news, etc. go to the publisher, and not the author (up to a point where many authors can’t really live off what little they get from sales, or where musicians actually end up owing the publisher, even though their albums went gold or platinum). But in the past, you had to pay the publisher, because there just wasn’t any other way to get what you wanted (and it was also the only way the artists would get any pay at all). Thankfully, today we have alternatives, which is why, after this long introduction, this little column talks about things that are worth spending money on – at least for me.

1. I’m a member of Kickstarter for just 2 months now, having joined for the notorious Double Fine Adventure fest, but I’m falling more and more in love with the concept, and the awesome projects that have come, and continue to come, out of it. Which is why this list is full of them, and on top of my list is the awesome movie project Tube. Not just because it’s going to be licensed under creative commons, adding to the ever growing repertoire of great public films, but because they’re taking the “open” concept even further by releasing all 3D assets under the same license, just as they did with their previous project Elephants Dream! This is especially interesting for OpenSim users, as it creates a pool of professional and potentially useful mesh objects that can be used in OpenSim with a little tweaking.

2. Speaking of films, the creators of the awesome series Pioneer One (which in itself is worth every penny of founding you can spare for their second season) are trying to fund Control, an exclusive pilot film which will only be available to the funders themselves!

3. And while we’re on series, have a look at Fallout: Nuka Break, which is a brilliantly made little series set in the Fallout universe. They’re also trying to fund the second season, and since I enjoyed their series almost more than the games themselves, I think it’s well worth funding.

4. Too many movies? What about this: Chris-fucking-Hülsbeck is producing the Turrican Anthology! If you don’t know who Chris or Turrican are: Chris Hülsbeck is one of the best composers of computer game soundtracks, starting at the time when C-64 was at its peak and pushing its Sound Interface Device to its limits. He wrote the scores to such classics as The Great Giana Sisters, To Be On Top and, of course, the legendary Turrican series. The antholgy is planned to be 3 CDs long, with the odd bonus track played by full orchestra thrown in!

5.  And finally, games! While I’ve founded several games already, there’s just one running at the moment, but what a game it is: If you’re like me and can’t get enough of the Zombie Apocalypse (that is, after having both read and watched The Walking Dead, played Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 and Dead Island and of course watched and played Resident Evil) you might want to shift your gaze towards The Dead Linger. If what they promise holds just a little bit of water, this might well be the most amazing zombie game in the history of ever. I’ve loved the concept of the likes of Project Zomboid, where the world is just a big huge sandbox and you’re pretty much left alone with whatever tools the game gives you to fend off the hordes of shambling undead, but TDL takes it to a whole new level, by making it not only fully 3D and multiplayer, but also fucking HUGE! They promise a procedurally generated game world the size of a small planet, where you can explore pretty much anything. If that’s not awesome, I don’t know what is.

Links:

Interview with Justin Clark-Casey

Hypergrid Business – The Hypergrid is a social web

Chuck Prophet on Archive.org

Douglas Coupland and William Gibson on the KWLS

William Gibson in Second Life (Part 1 | Part 2)

Jeremy Bailenson on Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life and New Worlds

Aloha

Topics:

• 1:30 How do you become an OpenSim core developer?
• 8:00 Can OpenSim become the “3D web”?
• 14:00 Does OpenSim need asset security?
• 24:00 Does OpenSim need feature parity with Second Life?
• 31:30 How do you decide which features are in OpenSim core?
• 37:30 The state of OpenSim physics.
• 40:00 Is there a roadmap for OpenSim?
• 45:30 Will OpenSim be moving away from Second Life?
• 53:00 Is OpenSim growing?
• 1:02:00 Will OpenSim and Second Life be threats to one another?
• 1:16:00 Did OpenSim “steal” Linden Lab’s technology?
• 1:18:00 About DRM and permissions.
• 1:29:30 Personal future plans.
• 1:32:30 About OpenSim Creations.

Links:

• Archive 3D
• Blenderswap
• Pathfinder’s Virtual World Presentation
• Lag in Second Life and OpenSim and how to deal with it

Still, I’ve been looking into software and services anyway, because none of them really fit my needs. Because what we have right now is a community, that is scattered across a lot of platforms that not always are able to communicate with one another. What we need, I think, is a cross-platform protocol that allows me to friend, follow and communicate with people on other services without leaving my current service! A system that’s decentralized, and federated; something like the hypergrid of social networks.

That’s why I’ve been following the diaspora projects since its beginning, as it seemed to offer the only real viable solution to this. And while I still think it’s an amazing project, I have to admit, it’s absolutely bloody hard to set up your own diaspora server, which takes away from the idea of a decentralized network that everyone can manage for themselves. What I needed was something that was as open and independent as diaspora, but as easy to set up as WordPress. And I found it.

Friendica is a social networking software that not only everyone can install and connect with other people on other friendica installations, but also with people using status.net and diaspora, as it fully supports the OStatus protocol out of the box. With plugins, it’s possible to connect it to other services, like twitter and facebook, and it even supports OpenID for registration. I know not everybody will get thrilled over this, but for a free and open nerd like me, that’s as free and open, as it gets.

So today, I launched taos.name as a public friendica installation that everyone can join, if they want. To enjoy the thrill of the distributed nature, I urge you to install it for yourself and play with it, but I know many people don’t like fiddling with those kinds of things, so I’m offering taos for public use (but there’s lots of other public servers you can join, if you don’t like mine).

I’ll see you, somewhere, on the Metaverse.

Kinda in response to the latest episode of Metareality Podcast, but actually more of a general comment on the show. Get your free Cactuar here.

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.

Hi everyone,

I just got home from work, and wanted to get this out asap:

Without much fanfare, but this time with a little more advance notice, SpotOn announced to hold a discussion on “SpotON3D ‘s Patent Pending Plug-in: Is it a threat or a benefit?” tomorrow, Friday, August 19th at 5pm SLT on their expo in Second Life (at http://slurl.com/secondlife/SpotON3D%20Biz%20Solutions/128/126/53/). As this is on – somewhat – neutral grounds, and gives a little advance notice this time, I’ll definitely attend and will be setting up a stream to broadcast the event from in-world, as well as post a summary here afterwards.

Here’s our chance to ask all the things you didn’t get a chance to last time, to voice your concerns and generally have fun! I’ll prepare some signs and other goodies for those who want to come, so watch this space for updates.

Greetings,

V

Stream

[EDIT: I made some signs for this event, which can both be found on OSC and the SL marketplace (freebie). Also, you can hit me up at the event if you want a copy:]

[Edit August 19th 2011: I set up the stream, which can be accessed through the link in either the sidebar or above (the one that says "stream"), on in-world at either the TGIB standalone or the Bay City pub.]