The Keystone XL pipeline is a proposed 1700-mile long pipeline that would carry diluted tar sands from Alberta, Canada to Texas. Tar sands (also called oil sands) are a mixture of sand and bitumen, a type of gooey petroleum that resembles tar. Tar sands can be processed into crude oil, and then refined into petroleum products like gasoline (aka. petrol), propane, and motor oil. TransCanada, the oil company who wants to build the pipeline, plans to process the tar sand in Houson, Texas, and from there will likely ship the product overseas. This plan would be extremely lucrative for TransCanada, but devastating to the US and global environments.

As we all know, gasoline and other fossil fuels release greenhouse gasses and pollution when they are burned. But the process of converting tar sands to crude oil also releases a lot of greenhouse gasses and pollution into the atmosphere. So, the whole process considered, gasoline derived from tar sands produces even more pollution than gasoline derived from crude oil. Even if the pipeline works flawlessly, and never ever leaks, the environmental impact of the pollution from tar sands would be immense.

But tar sands pipelines are estimated to be 16 times more likely to leak than a conventional crude oil pipeline. This is due to all that sand scraping against the inside of the pipeline, combined with the already corrosive nature of the bitumen. And TransCanada already has a crude oil pipeline: the original Keystone pipeline, which became operational in June 2010. Less than a year later, it experienced a massive leak from one of the pumping stations. And before that, even before the pipeline became operational, TransCanada was forced by government order to inspect and replace defective steel pipe purchased from an Indian manufacturer named Welspun Power and Steel. It seems that Welspun forewent certain safety checks in its rush to meet demand, and some pipe they had sold to other companies had already proved defective.

So, you may be wondering who TransCanada chose to provide steel pipes for the new Keystone XL pipeline? Naturally, it is the very same Welspun Power and Steel that provided defective steel for the last pipeline! What’s more, TransCanada has requested a permit for the Keystone XL to use thinner steel pipes than is standard, to save themselves $1 billion on construction. They’ve also requested to pump at higher pressure than is normal, I guess because they enjoy the thrill of danger and the smell of money.

It seems like the proposed pipeline is pretty much destined to leak. And when it does, it will be a disaster. The proposed pipeline would run directly over the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge natural underground water reserve that spans most of Nebraska, and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. That aquifer provides 30% of the US’s ground water used for irrigation, as well as drinking water for 2 million people. The pipeline also runs through the Sand Hills of Nebraska, which contain 1.3 million acres of wetlands, one of the largest wetlands environments in the US; several hundred acres would be directly at risk if the pipeline leaked. And to top it off, Nebraska has a long history of seismic activity, making it rather shakey ground for a high-pressure pipeline built from cheap steel.

If a leak occurs in that area, the bitumen mixture could pollute the wetlands and leech down into the aquifer, contaminating the water with benzene, mercury, arsenic, and many other toxic chemicals. If an earthquake caused widespread damage to the pipeline, the impact would be especially dire. I can’t even imagine the possible impact if the pipeline were deliberately sabotaged. How do you secure a 1700-mile long high-pressure pipeline built with substandard steel? A few small explosives placed at strategic points along the pipeline could be catastrophic.

Obviously, people don’t want toxins in the food they eat or the water they drink. So, Nebraska, western Kansas, etc. would either need to find a new water supply (maybe build a pipeline from somewhere with uncontaminated water?), or spend a lot of time and money carefully purifying the ground water before it could be used even for irrigation, let alone human consumption. Either way, water would be more expensive, so food produced in that region would be more expensive. Plus, production would likely go down, thereby driving national food prices up even more due to scarcity.

So with a leak being pretty much inevitable, and the potential consequences of a leak being so dire, how could this pipeline plan have survived? Surely in the 2 years since it was proposed, the government agency responsible for studying its possible impacts would have realized what a bad idea it is, right?

Well, due to the multinational nature of the pipeline, the agency responsible is the State Department. And the State Department did release an analysis of the possible impact — but the Environmental Protection Agency has strongly criticized that report, saying that the analysis does not adequately address issues like the potential groundwater contamination or damage to the wetlands. The EPA said the same thing about the State Department’s analysis last year, but the State Department still hasn’t performed a thorough analysis.

Why is the State Department being so lackadaisical about such an important matter? That may be the influence of Paul Elliot, a former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run.

Today, Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State (i.e. head of the State Department), several former Clinton campaign staffers are State Department officials… and Paul Elliot is now working for TransCanada, as a lobbyist to the State Department. A Freedom of Information Act request recently brought to light emails that indicate Elliot has been liaising with State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills, one of Elliot’s buddies from the Clinton campaign, to influence the State Department and ease the proposed pipeline deal through the system.

It’s easy to guess why the State Department didn’t conduct a thorough analysis, when they had an old pal whispering in their ear, assuring them that the pipeline would be safe, would create jobs and help the US economy, would reduce US dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and so on. To put it mildly, the State Department’s objectivity in this matter is rather suspect.

In the end, the fate of the pipeline comes down to President Obama, who has the authority to deny TransCanada the permit to build the pipeline. But, his stance on this matter isn’t clear. I’d wager that the State Department is advising him to approve it, but the opposition to the pipeline has been quite vocal. Scores of politicians, celebrities, scientists, Nebraska farmers, and others have urged Obama to reject the proposal. In August, activists staged a sit-in in front of the White House. Over 1200 activists were arrested and hauled off by police during the two-weeks of peaceful protesting. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed petitions and wrote concerned letters to the EPA, the State Department, and the President.

The optimist in me hopes that Obama’s rhetoric about supporting a “green energy future” means he will reject the proposal. The cynic in me thinks that Obama, as a politician facing re-election, wouldn’t dare go against his base on such a major issue. But the pessimist in me fears that the US government is too corrupt, too influenced by corporate lobbying, to place the wellbeing of the populace and the environment before the financial interests of corporations.

So, it’s not clear to me which way this will go. But it is clear that if the pipeline is approved, the consequences will be profound, even beyond the environmental impact. The hypocrisy and corruption of government is becoming increasingly intolerable. To approve this pipeline would be to pour gasoline on the fires of revolution.

Unfortunately, the appeal of Google+ quickly wore off, as it became apparent that Google was suspending accounts judged to be using a pseudonym or other “not real” name. The first highly-visible case among the Second Life crowd was Opensource Obscure being suspended, but hundreds more Second Life users were suspended within a week. And it wasn’t just Second Life residents: pseudonymous accounts of all types were being suspended en masse, along with accounts representing companies and organizations. Official statements from Google employees confirmed that Google+ users are required to use what Google calls “common names” or “real names”.

The usual rationale of real-name-only policies, like Blizzard Entertainment’s controversial Real ID system, is that forcing people to use their real names will promote more civil discourse. The reasoning is that people will think twice about what they post, since everything they say can be traced to their real-world identity. Personally, I’m rather skeptical that such a policy actually makes people behave more civilly, given how casually many Facebook users post homophobic slurs and bilious attacks under their real names.

But it’s true that the policy will change the tenor of discourse by making certain people think twice about posting anything that can be traced back to them. For instance, you probably won’t have as many posts from political activists, corporate whistleblowers (or even just people wanting to vent about their boss), LGBT individuals, abuse victims, ethnic minorities, practitioners of “alternative lifestyles”, or anyone else who might face real-world repercussions for expressing their views online, or who might be subject to online harrassment because of their real-world names. Google seems to have no qualms about excluding these people. Their latest video statement expresses a simple sentiment: show everyone your real name, or get out.

As it turns out, though, Google’s claimed justification for the policy is not so much that it make you behave more civilly, but rather that it will make you easier to stalk “connect with”:

Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. Because of this, it’s important to use your common name so that the people you want to connect with can find you. Your common name is the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, any of these would be acceptable.

From that description, I’d reason that it was perfectly okay for me to have a profile under my pseudonym, Jacek Antonelli. After all, I have many more friends and co-workers who know me by that name than by my legal name. This blog, written entirely pseudonymously, gets thousands of times more views than the blog I write under my legal name. My most well-known creative contributions to society, such as the Imprudence Viewer, were published pseudonymously. It’s pretty safe to say that the vast majority of people who know me (or know of me), know me by my pseudonym.

But, as blogger Skud has discovered, Google won’t let you use a pseudonym even if that is how you are most commonly known. Although, there is apparently an unstated exception to that rule: if you are a famous celebrity like Lady Gaga or 50 Cent, you’re allowed to use your stage name. But if you’re just a writer or technologist known by your pen name to your friends, co-workers, and thousands of readers, that’s not good enough.

Actually, it’s not just pseudonymous accounts that have been suspended. Blake Ross, co-founder of Firefox, now working at Facebook, was briefly suspended despite using his legal name. Once the news came out, Ross’s account was quickly restored. Others have not been so fortunate, and their accounts remain suspended, even after providing Google with legitimate government identification showing that their Google+ profile name matches their legal name.

Other users have been put on the chopping block for using quotation marks or other punctuation (‘Charles “Chuck” Jones Jr.’ would not be an acceptable name), numbers (even if they are part of your legal name), and sometimes even just non-English glyphs. All these are apparently considered suspicious by Google’s automated software, making your profile more likely to come up for review.

Meanwhile, at least one inquisitive person has used an obviously fake ID to convince Google to suspend an account, then used another obviously fake ID to convince them to reactivate it. So the policy may be founded on specious reasoning, it may stifle free speech, and it may be harmful to legitimate users… but at least it will be ineffective at stopping abuse!

As if the policy itself and its inconsistent enforcement weren’t disturbing enough, the consequences of being suspended are rather startling: all public sign of your account just vanishes. Your profile page, your posts, your replies to other people’s posts, are all hidden. All mentions of you are even redacted from other people’s posts, your name replaced with asterisks. Your account and activities are effectively erased from history.

What’s worse, being suspended doesn’t affect only your Google+ account. As Doctor Popular found out the hard way, it also locks you out of all other services that use the new Google Profiles system. Currently, Google Profiles is tied into Google+, Google Reader, Buzz, Picasa, and a few others. I would be very surprised if Google doesn’t also tie it into Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, YouTube, Blogger, etc. within a year or two.

So, if you use any of these Google services, you might one day find yourself completely locked out of years worth of your digital life, just because you are suspected of violating a policy that is fundamentally misguided and enforced arbitrarily and inconsistently.

That’s a pretty scary thought.

Scary enough, in fact, that I am extricating myself from all Google services, for both my pseudonymous and real-world identities. I have deleted my Google+ account so that I’m less likely to be targetted, and I’ve backed up as much data as I can. It will be a lot of work even to find suitable replacements, let alone migrate all my data, email, contacts, subscriptions, and so forth. But, it would be insane to rely on any Google services anymore, having seen how easily anyone — even people following the rules — can be suspended.

Further reading

• “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power – dana boyd | apophenia
• Who is harmed by a “Real Names” policy? – Geek Feminism Wiki
• My Name Is Me
• Why Facebook and Google’s Concept of ‘Real Names’ Is Revolutionary – The Atlantic
• The Cases For and Against Google+’s Real-Name Policy – The Atlantic Wire
• A Case for Pseudonyms – EFF
• Tateru Nino has written extensively about the issue, exploring it from a variety of perspectives.
• What’s Really Behind The Facebook/Google Real Name Debate? – All Things D
• Google+ Identity Crisis: What’s at Stake With Real Names and Privacy – Wired
• Google+ requires you to use your “real” name – Sai
• Google’s Double-Plus Real Names – Signifying Media
• “I’m Your Biggest Fan, I’ll Follow You Until You Love Me” – Border House
• Searching Twitter for #nymwars, #realnames, or #plusgate reveals a lively debate over the issue.

(Full disclosure: the viewer in that particular case was the Imprudence Experimental, which I am involved with. But, users of other viewers have been wrongfully banned by similar systems in the past.)

Simply put, a CDS does not provide any significant protection against content rippers. It is snake oil: a product created to commercially exploit store owners’ fear. If you have a CDS set up in your shop, you aren’t protecting your content, you’re just paying someone to invade your customers’ privacy, drive away legitimate customers, and blemish your reputation.

Most people don’t understand how a CDS works, but believe that it might actually be able to stop content rippers. The purpose of this post is to explain how they function, why they are ineffective, and furthermore why they are harmful to your customers and bad for your business.

How a CDS Works

A typical CDS works by telling each visitor’s viewer that it should visit a certain web page using the viewer’s streaming media system (the code that shows movies and web pages on a prim). The web page is hosted on a site controlled by the CDS operator. Each visitor is sent to a unique web address, which allows the CDS to figure out which connection belongs to which visitor.

Like nearly all web browsers, the viewer’s built-in browser is programmed to send its “user agent” to any website it connects to. The user agent is a chunk of text that includes information such as your operating system, the built-in browser type, the viewer UI skin you are using, and the name/channel of the viewer. For example, my user agent when using Imprudence 1.3 is the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; chrome://navigator/locale/navigator.properties; rv:1.8.1.21) Gecko/20090304 SecondLife/1.23.5.136262 (Imprudence; default skin)

(You can visit whatsmyuseragent.com with any viewer or web browser to see your user agent.)

Notice that the user agent text plainly states that I am using Imprudence. The CDS isn’t really doing any “detection”, just listening to what the viewer voluntarily tells it.

A Waste of Money

The method used by the CDS to “detect” the viewer has two important implications about its effectiveness:

1. The viewer can be programmed to lie about its name. A malicious viewer can claim to be the official Second Life viewer or a trustworthy third-party viewer, and the CDS would be fooled.
2. The CDS can only scan people who have streaming media enabled. Anyone can go to their viewer preferences and turn that feature off to evade “detection” (or to protect their privacy and avoid being harrassed by the CDS).

Using a CDS is basically the equivalent of a RL store hiring a bouncer to frisk every customer and kick out anyone stupid enough to wear an “I ♥ shoplifting” shirt. Pretty rude to your customers, and a waste of money, right?

Well, it gets worse.

An Invasion of Customers’ Privacy

Every time a CDS successfully “scans” one of your customers, the CDS operator can create a record in a database with the customer’s avatar name, the viewer they were using, their IP address, which store they visited, and when. Naturally, that means the CDS can track the SL shopping habits of your customers, since they will be scanned every time they enter any store using that brand of CDS.

What’s more, unless your customer uses a web proxy (most people don’t), the IP address can be used to determine approximately where on Earth they live. And if multiple avatars show up with the same IP address within a short span of time, the operator can reasonably guess that they are logging in from the same home or office, and might even be alts of the same person.

(Some CDS operators advertise the ability to detect and ban alts. But, this is unreliable and prone to false positives, since many internet providers recycle IP addresses. An internet provider might assign a certain address to a content ripper one day, then assign the same address to an innocent person the next day. Any CDS that bans offenders by IP address is potentially banning legitimate customers, too.)

So as a store owner, you are helping the CDS operator to gather information about your customers, without your customers’ consent or any sort of privacy policy, purely for the CDS operator’s own use. Even more humiliating, you are actually paying the CDS operator for the privilege of letting them track your customers. And don’t forget that you are being scanned by the CDS, too. All this just to have the illusion of protection.

What To Do About It

If you are a store owner using a CDS, get rid of it. You have been swindled. The CDS is useless, invades your customer’s privacy, bans innocent people, and harms your reputation.

I mentioned earlier that there was a specific instance of a CDS banning a customer using a legitimate viewer. It was a false positive; the CDS was configured to ban any viewer it didn’t recognize. When news broke out that the store owner was using a CDS, the store’s reputation took a hit. Even people who were not directly affected by the ban swore they would avoid the store as long as it used a CDS. Thankfully, the store owner removed it after being told what had happened. Lesson learned, hopefully.

If you are a consumer, protect your privacy. Turn off streaming media and audio when you don’t need it, especially when you are shopping or exploring. It’s not enough to press the “Stop” button, you must disable it in your preferences. Here’s how:

• In old-style viewers (Second Life 1.23, Imprudence, Phoenix, etc.):
  1. Open the Preferences window (Ctrl-P), and select the “Audio & Video” tab.
  2. Look for a checkbox labelled “Play streaming media when available” (or similar wording), and make sure it is unchecked.
     
  3. Below that may be a checkbox labelled “Automatically play media”. Make sure it is unchecked, too.
  4. Press the “OK” button to save your preferences.
• In new-style viewers (SL Viewer 2, Kirstens, etc.):
  1. Open the Preferences window (Ctrl-P), and select the “Sound & Media” tab.
  2. Look for a volume slider labelled “Media”. Next to that will be a checkbox labelled “Enabled”. Make sure it is unchecked.
     
  3. A little bit below that is a checkbox labelled “Allow Media to auto-play”. Make sure it is unchecked, too.
     
  4. Press the “OK” button to save your preferences.

Conclusion

There are simply no reasons to use a CDS, and plenty of reasons not to. They cost money, they don’t work, they violate your customers’ privacy, they ban innocent people, and damage your reputation when your customers find out you use one.

I understand that content ripping is a serious issue. If you have had your products ripped, you likely feel hurt and violated. But turning around and violating your customers is not the solution.

Yet, even though I haven’t played it in over three weeks, I still feel an urge to play it nearly every day. There is something about its creative, free-form play that is incredibly attractive, even addictive. Meanwhile, I have my own OpenSim region where I can create and do anything I want, yet it sits neglected for lack of time, interest, or motivation.

Why this stark difference? Why is Minecraft, the more limited and less creative of the two, the more appealing? And what, if anything, can I do to harness the creative drive that Minecraft inspires, and channel it into my OpenSim region and other projects?

Minecraft is entirely open-ended, with no set objectives, no experience points or character levels, no quests or story or ending. Just a world — your own world, infinite and unique — waiting to be shaped by your hand and imagination. In that respect, it’s very much like Second Life / OpenSim (SL/OS). Both start as pristine worlds, with no inherent purpose or goals, but which the players progressively transform into something unique and personal.

Of the two platforms, SL/OS undeniably has a vastly greater range of creative possibilities. Yet despite Minecraft’s limited toolset, it has inspired amazing feats of creativity: elaborate bases built into cliffsides, vast minecart railways, replicas of the USS Enterprise, even working simulations of computer microprocessors.

On the surface, Minecraft is quite simple, and not the sort of thing you’d expect to yield such creativity. You’re dropped empty-handed into a vast, randomly generated world of pixelated blocks of dirt and stone, trees, animals, and monsters. The monsters come out when it’s dark, so you need to build some form of shelter before nightfall. You accomplish that by digging up the dirt and stone blocks to make a cave, or stack the blocks up to make walls for a house or fortress. You can cut (or punch!) down trees, then use the wood to make various kinds of tools, which let you dig more efficiently, mine for coal and metals and gems, and craft weapons to defend yourself against the monsters.

From there, the game goes deeper, with dozens of items and objects you can create: doors, ladders, furnaces, minecarts, dynamite, even simple pseudo-eletrical circuits that can control doors and railways. As the game progresses and you gather more kinds of materials, the number of possible items you can create grows. But you are still limited to the items the game creator thought of. You can’t add a swishy cat tail to your avatar, or build a working airplane of your own design, or any of the countless other things that SL/OS lets you do.

So why is Minecraft so inspiring, so addictive, so fun? Why do I find it so much more compelling to build a create a castle in Minecraft, when I could create the same or better castle in SL/OS?

I would say that it’s precisely because of its constraints and limitations that Minecraft is more engaging and compelling. Too much creative freedom is daunting, and can actually stifle creativity. Minecraft strikes an appealing balance between constraint and freedom, guiding your creativity without forcing anything.

• Minecraft suggests a motivating purpose, but lets you ignore it. The danger of the monsters coming out at night gives you a reason to create a shelter. That initial purpose naturally suggests further courses of action: gather materials, expand your base, and make it really grand and elaborate. The game never forces you to do anything, but always provides a selection of constructive activities to choose from.

  SL/OS, on the other hand, provides no motivation or purpose. It is a blank canvas upon which you can paint anything you like, in any way you want, with near-limitless possibilities. But you have to bring the motivation, the purpose, and the focus to decide what to create.

• Minecraft provides a rich, interesting world as a starting point. When you first play Minecraft, the game generates a random landscape, just for you, complete with scenic mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, trees and beaches. This constrains your freedom somewhat, but also gives you ideas. You may stumble upon a cool mountain formation, and think, “That’s where I’ll build my fortress!” Or, you may find a series of caverns that descend deep into the earth, filled with valuable materials and dangerous monsters, and think, “I’ll explore these caverns, and build a minecart railway to carry the minerals back home!”

  SL/OS does not provide any such a starting point. Instead, you get a flat plain, a featureless island, or (at best) a prefab terrain constructed by someone else. There are no naturally-occurring landmarks or points of interest, and the way the world is laid out in a grid of individual square regions discourages free-flowing, natural terrain. Again, you have to bring your own inspiration.

• Minecraft offers challenges and obstacles to overcome. It takes effort to gather the materials necessary to build anything. You have to dig up each block of dirt and mine every piece of metal, all while avoiding monsters and lava flows. Each material and item looks and behaves in a certain way and has its own limitations, which can inspire creative solutions. If you’re building on a high tower or cliffside, you risk falling and dying, thus dropping all your hard-earned materials onto the ground.

  These kinds of gameplay elements add a sense of danger and excitement to the creative process, and overcoming challenges increases the sense of accomplishment when you finish something. Building in SL/OS is comparatively safe and straightforward. Prims are a free and unlimited resource, not a valuable commodity that takes effort to collect. Most of the obstacles are due to technical issues or lack of training/skill, both of which tend to cause frustration, not excitement.

• Minecraft promotes spontaneous, continuous creation. You can just grab a tool and start digging, laying out blocks, or crafting items. Of course, you can do some planning if you feel like it, and it’s surely necessary for the really complex builds like the micoprocessor simulation I mentioned earlier. But in general, you just build as you go, drawing inspiration from your surroundings, and see where your imagination takes you.

  This is true to some extent with SL/OS as well, but most of the “serious” content creation these days is done outside of the world. Skins, clothes, textures, animations, sounds, sculpties, and meshes are all created in other programs like Photoshop and Maya (or GIMP and Blender), then imported into the world. This creates a joy-dampering divide between the act of creation, and the pleasure of seeing it come to life.

• Minecraft is pure play. The things you create are just for fun, and have no impact or consequences beyond the game (except perhaps the pride of showing off via YouTube videos). As far as I am aware, nobody is trying to monetize Minecraft by selling their creations or their creative services. Someone might think to do so — but that would, I suspect, ruin most of the fun, and turn the play into work.

  Meanwhile, SL/OS is increasingly saturated with people trying to make a buck. In the same way, I’ve observed the individual lives of many SL Residents (including myself) gradually shift from self-indulgent play and entertainment, to more serious business and moneymaking. Making money isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it does tend to take away the joy of creating things purely for pleasure.

So, if Minecraft has these engaging and addictive qualities, should SL/OS try to emulate them? Not necessarily. It’s important to remember that SL/OS is not a game. It sits halfway between a tool like Blender, and a game like Minecraft. It is both a content creation tool, and a content delivery and consumption platform.

Some aspects of Minecraft would simply be inappropriate. SL/OS would not be improved by requiring the user to cut down trees to make plywood cubes, for example. Nor would anyone find it entertaining to lose years worth of inventory because they fell off a tall building or were mauled by a zombie while AFK.

But, other aspects of Minecraft can be used to make the creative process more engaging, both in SL/OS and in the “real world”.

• Nudge yourself towards a motivating purpose, but don’t cling to it. Think about what you’re creating, and why (even if the reason is merely “it would be totally awesome”). Keep a selection of possible future courses of action in mind, and let your gut choose which to pursue. Allow your motivations and feelings to change, as they naturally will, but always be aware of them.
• Use a chaotic or inspirational starting point. Look for serendipitous inspiration in the shapes of coffee stains, ink splatters, the lines of a crinkled-up piece of paper, or other random shapes. Use a random terrain generator like L3DT as a starting point for designing sims. Or, get some modelling clay and just mush it around chaotically for a while.
• Set challenges and constraints for yourself. Use half as many prims as you thought were necessary. Pick an unconventional color or style, and make it work. Build it in a way that would be totally impossible in the real world. Make up rules about which shapes or colors can be next to each other.
• Start with media that promote spontaneous creation. Build with prims first, instead of jumping straight to sculpties or meshes. Work with malleable physical media like charcoal or clay. Make quick, throw-away sketches, mockups, or prototypes.
• Create for yourself, for fun, for the pure joy of creation. Be selfish. Indulge your creativity. Work on fun, cool things that stir up your imagination. Make a crazy hat to wear, or a secret fort where you can hide out with your friends. Be a kid. Play.

With any luck, learning these lessons from Minecraft will allow me to focus my creative urges on more meaningful and important things.

As I previously posted, Cuddlefish Junction is now closed and all products taken off the shelves. Thank you to all my customers over the years for your business! I hope my creations have touched you in many places ways.

So, this blog post is to announce that Cuddlefish Junction is closing May 30. My XStreet listings are coming down that day as well, so the next two weeks are your last opportunity to purchase Deliverators, Squidograms, or my other products in SL.

Even after I’m gone, nearly all of my products should keep working forever (until LL does something to break them, anyway). The Deliverator is a bit different, though, since it relies on my server for looking up people’s UUIDs, and I don’t know how long I’ll be running this site. So, fair warning: some day in the future — it could be two months from now, or a year, or ten years — the Deliverator service will be shut down. If that concerns you, don’t buy one.

You can find all of my products at Cuddlefish Junction in SL, or buy the Deliverator, Squidogram, and Bubble Ride at my XStreet SL storefront.

P.S. If you come by the store, be sure to give the Giant Octopus a goodbye kiss while you’re there.

Yesterday was also the last rezday I’ll be celebrating in Second Life. A recent culmination of circumstances has pushed me away from Second Life, and triggered my migration to OpenSim. I’ll be wrapping up my affairs over the next month, then putting my Second Life account on the shelf. By this time next year, I expect SL to be mostly irrelevant to my day-to-day life.

I’ll explain why I’m leaving below, but I don’t want this to be a completely whiney frumple post. Yes, I’m leaving Second Life, but it has been a rich and amazing four years. Here are a few of the interesting things I’ve done in my time in Second Life (in no particular order):

• Built hundreds of silly little things as part of a weekly speed-building competition at The Shelter.
• Worked a variety of odd-jobs: scripter, texturer, builder, animator, artist, teacher, clothing designer, shop owner, and more.
• Taught dozens of students how to build with prims. (I was an instructor at NCI for several months, teaching one class at first, then later three.)
• Exhibited my artwork in several virtual galleries.
• Discovered countless things about myself that I never knew.
• Met the best friends I’ve ever known. (And hope to keep even after I’ve left.)
• Fell head-over-heels in love. (More than once.)
• Opened up a shop to sell several of my creations. (Some were more useful than others).
• Earned thousands of US dollars working as a metaverse development contractor. (And found out how much fun it is to pay self-employment taxes.)
• Created a series of “chibi” comics featuring toon versions of me and my friends in various silly situations.
• Organized the Creator’s Playgroup, a small group of friends who would do show-and-tells, themed creation games, and collaborative builds.
• Exploited a short-lived server glitch in order to build a giant megaprim sculpty octopus.
• Won second place for my entry in a UI design contest, earning a cash prize of over USD $700. (I also earned a multi-post tirade about the Leninist and anti-populist concepts my design supposedly exhibited, and about the downfall of the SL economy that would occur if I ever had the opportunity to implement my design. That was almost as good as the $700.)
• Owned a variety of homes: a modernist house built into the side of a cliff overlooking an icy waterfall; a peaceful garden facing out to the sea; and a sky platform high above a volcanic island that resembles a sea creature when viewed from above.
• Took an epic multi-day sailing trip of the mainland waterways, navigating my trusty Flying Tako through narrow channels, shallow waters, and hundreds of perilous sim border crossings — and lived to tell the tale. (My motto and catch phrase was “Sand bars and ban lines be damned!”)
• Developed a tool to create avatar animations with Blender. (Then gave it away for free.)
• Attended the Resident Experience Team Office Hours for months, providing feedback, ideas, and patches.
• Organized the User Experience Interest Group after the Resident Experience Team abandoned the above mentioned office hours. (We’ve met weekly for a year and a half, generating countless great ideas for Linden Lab to ignore.)
• Contributed numerous software patches to improve the Second Life viewer. (Linden Lab even got around to using a few of them, eventually.)
• Got fed up with LL and started a new viewer project with my friend McCabe — despite neither of us being much good at C++ at the time.

So you could hardly call my time in Second Life dull. There were ups and down, excitement and frustration, good times and bad. All considered, I’ve had a good run in SL. But the time has come to move on.

I’m sure some of you have guesses about why I’m leaving, but it’s not as simple as it seems. I could point to the kerfuffle over the Third-Party Viewer (TPV) policy as the reason for leaving, and people would nod in understanding. But that’s not the whole story.

True, after the annoucement of the new Terms of Service (which requires you agree to the new policy), I was certain I would have to leave SL and cancel my account before April 30 to avoid the legal implications of an overreaching and ill-conceived policy. But the policy has recently been revised enough that, although I still don’t like the policy, it’s no longer an urgent danger that prevents me from logging in.

So, I could stay in Second Life — if I wanted to.

But you see, by my own nature, I’m a creator. I can’t help creating things. It’s what I do, and I love to do it. It’s what attracted me to Second Life in the first place. SL was the ultimate canvas, a “game” where the goal was to create and share cool things with other people. My own skillset and interests in art, computer graphics, and programming served me extremely well in SL. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) much in SL that I couldn’t do if I applied myself to it. And as you can see from the sizable list above, I’ve tasted a huge variety of what SL has to offer.

Yet for the past year or two, I’ve had the growing feeling that the things I enjoyed about Second Life have been slipping away. I attribute this feeling to a number of factors:

• Frequent policy missteps by Linden Lab. Seriously, LL screws up so often that I have an entire blog category devoted to their messes. After a while, I just stopped caring enough to even write about it. Linden Lab pulling a serious policy gaff has become less novel than a cat playing the piano on YouTube, and far more depressing. A cat can learn to paw at the piano keys, but Linden Lab apparently can’t learn to respect or understand its user base.
• A gradual shift in Linden Lab’s corporate culture. When I first signed up for Second Life, Linden Lab felt like a cool, creative company full of awesome people who were passionate about SL. Today, Linden Lab still has plenty of awesome people, but it’s not a cool, creative company anymore — because the people with a real passion for SL aren’t the ones driving the company anymore. Maybe it’s inevitable that as a startup grows, the suits take over and it becomes focused more on profits and other serious-business-type stuff, and less on making something cool. But that inevitability doesn’t make it any less unpleasant.
• A growing cynicism towards Linden Lab among Residents. This goes hand in hand with the policy missteps and corporate culture shift. Unfortunately, there is a vicious cycle at work here. As a whole, Linden Lab doesn’t understand the Residents, so it frequently does things that upset and anger them. Having been burned by Linden Lab in the past, Residents habitually see everything the Lindens do and say in the worst possible light, and frequently overreact and lash out. These negative reactions from the Residents drive the Lindens further away, so that they understand and relate to the Residents even less, and are more likely to do things that upset them. Both sides started the cycle, and both sides perpetuate it. (Myself included, I’m afraid.)
• An increasing prevalence of fear, intolerance, greed, pettiness, and viciousness among the Resident population. For as long as I have been in Second Life, there have been doomcriers, bigots, moneygrubbers, and drama mongers. But they were just a nuisance, fringe elements that the rest of us shrugged off as we went about our lives. But today, those things are an integral part of the culture and mindset of Second Life. The dwindling percentage of Residents who are here to create, learn, and enjoy life are being overwhelmed by individuals whose lives are ruled by the most base and destructive aspects of human nature. Or so it seems to me. Maybe I’m just getting crotchety in my “old age”, and resentful of a new generation of Residents with a different set of values. But regardless of whether the phenomenon is real or just my perception, Second Life no longer feels like a haven for folk like me.
• My own shift towards more serious occupations. When I first joined Second Life, I enjoyed it tremendously. I learned new things daily, socialized with friends constantly, created and experimented freely, and explored the grid, eyes wide with wonder. Over time, though, I became more involved in “serious” things, and began to accumulate obligations. Teaching, running a shop, working as a contractor, organizing groups, maintaining a viewer, helping users and customers. The carefree days of my virtual youth are long gone; I’ve drifted away from my old friends, and my emotional connection to SL has frayed. Sure, I could make changes in my life to become more involved in the fun parts of Second Life. But given the overall situation, it makes more sense to start again in OpenSim.

So you see, the TPV policy was simply the impetus to act on my growing dissatisfaction with Linden Lab and Second Life. If the TPV policy hadn’t been so screwed up, I wouldn’t be leaving right now, but my departure was inevitable given the way things have been going. (Besides, given Linden Lab’s reputation for making exactly the same mistakes every time they introduce a new policy change, I doubt they were capable of not screwing up the TPV policy.)

So, what’s next for me? The exciting frontier of OpenSim, that’s what!

I’ve always wanted to have my own sim to mess around with, but a Second Life sim has always been prohibitively expensive for me. (A full SL sim costs USD $295/month, plus a $1000 set up fee). Now I have my own self-managed sim on OSGrid with free uploads, an unlimited prim count, megaprims however I want them, LightShare server-side windlight control, and precise collision meshes for sculpties — for a paltry USD $15/month.

So for me, OpenSim is a creative paradise. A giant, octopus-shaped creative paradise.

That said, OpenSim is still a rough and rugged frontier. I happen to enjoy that fact, and my skills are put to good use there. The reason I can run a sim for only $15/month is because I have the technical know-how to set it up and manage it myself. Less technically-inclined people should expect to pay in the range of $40-$100 per month for a managed sim from a commercial OpenSim host. Still, it’s a bargain compared to Second Life.

But OpenSim is certainly not for everyone. There are still plenty of glitches, and there aren’t all the amenities of Second Life. The number of users is much smaller than Second Life, and they are spread across a large number of separate grids. There’s not nearly as much content as there is in SL, and generally not “professional quality”. Not all of the grids have any money system, so you won’t find such a bustling commercial economy as you do in SL. But the flip side of all this is the fact that it’s easy to make a name for yourself in OpenSim if you’re open, friendly, and have a bit of talent.

I’m sure I’ll be happy pioneering OpenSim; it’s a good fit for me. As for my plans with Second Life, I’ll be tying up loose ends over the next month. I’ll be closing down Cuddlefish Junction soon, but I’m making arrangements for my most popular products to be sold through other shops.

I’m not disappearing, though. I’ll still be responding to emails, I’ll still be on Plurk, and I’ll be posting here about my adventures with OpenSim. I’m not cancelling my SL account, and I’ll probably drop in from time to time to export my creations or attend special events. In fact, given how infrequently I’ve been logging in over the past year, hardly anyone would have even noticed the change if I hadn’t said anything.

So, this isn’t really a goodbye; I’m just moving down the block. See you around the metaverse!

Meriken Co. has a nicely sculpted and textured freebie octopus to wear on your head! It’s even wearing a festive holly cluster. Such a stylish cephalopod!

You can get it at Meriken Co. in SL.

Thanks to Peter Stindberg for telling me about it!

Instead of going through the chore of opening your friend’s profiles and dragging the item onto them, one by one, until you get RDNDI (Repetitive Drag-N-Drop Injury) — just put the item and a list of recipients into your Deliverator and let it do the boring part while you munch on gingerbread cookies and watch TV.

The Deliverator can be yours for just L$500, and will serve you dutifully and lovingly, again and again. ;)

P.S. Don’t forget, Cephalopodmas is just 3 days away! A Squidogram always makes for a slimy and surprising souvenier for that special someone. Just L$50, with 5 packs and 10 packs at a discount!