The Voices in My Head

“How do we know the dead long for life? Perhaps death is to awake from a dream, and we cannot remember why we lived at all?”

So what is death? Certainly, it ends all social contact with the living, barring a few incidents with psychic mediums and the like. But what else is there? Shakespear wrote “to sleep, perchance to dream”. He was talking of the idea of giving up on the great struggle that is life, to willing stop living. Whether he meant death by your own hand, assisted death, or simply giving up, is unclear, but with those words it seems to me the character was contemplating death as a peaceful end to the struggles and trauma that face us in our daily lives. And certainly we do face such slings and arrows.

This is kind of opposite to what Zhuang Zi said. Zhuang was of the opinion that death is like waking up, which is the complete opposite of what the Bard of Avon said. Who is right? There’s only one way to find out.

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Linden Lab has posted more details on their age verification. yet again, they are dropping the ball.

They want land owners to flag their parcels if they have mature content, and will shortly be imposing penalties against any land owner who doesn’t comply. That’d fine as far as it goes. Except… so far, only concierge-level landowners have been given the option to do so. there are an awful lot of land owners with adult content on this grid (which was sold to us as 18+ only) who do not have the option of verifying with LL’s chosen “trustworthy” (if you can believe that) 3rd party supplier, as LL has not yet rolled out verification to them. Even for land owners, this will make them very lonely in their palaces, as no one else 9except concierge users) can, at present, verify, and only verified users will be allowed into such flagged parcels.

yes, LL is being remarkably stupid in how they are presenting this. It’s remarkably stupid in core concept too, but the presentation is just as stupid.

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Just a few random hints on how to make voice work for you in SL.

• Make sure your microphone is plugged in properly.
• Use a headset. Separate microphone and desktop speakers will cause audible feedback.
• Turn off your main desktop speakers. if you don’t, your microphone will pick that up and cause feedback. That can be very unpleasant for anyone near you. This can’t be repeated enough. Especially since it will sound like you are repeating everythng you, and everyone else, says.
• Make sure you have no background noise in your room when doing voice. No one wants to hear your TV, your favourite radio station, your screaming kids, your mother telling you to wash the dishes, or those police cars rushing outside.
• In your windows control panel, open the “Sound & Audio Devices” window, look at the “Volume” tab. Click on the “Advanced” button that is in the Device Volume box.
• Make sure the master volume is at or below 50% of maximum. If it is too high, feedback will often result.
• Within the audio input controls, make sure the master volume is at 100%, and the microphone volume at about 75%.
• Obviously, linux and mac users don’t have control panels that work in the exact way described above, if at all. Alas and alack, I lack both of those, and can not offer specific advice there.
• After you have checked all the sound settings above, run the voice setup wizard that is inside SL. It can be found in edit/preferences, and then clicking on the “Voice Chat” tab.
• Inside the “Device Settings” button, make sure both input and output are set to your main sound device. If you use a voice changer program, make sure the input is set to that program.
• It is highly recommended that you use the push-to-talk settings. Without that, SL will constantly broadcast every cough, wheeze, and nose-scratch to the world at large. This can be a little bit obnoxious to some. Make sure the “Use Push-to-Talk in toggle mode” box is ticked, then press the “Set key” button to choose a key. I normally have the F12 key set for this purpose, as it never gets used for anything else.

Oh, there are a bunch of other settings, but it is mostly common sense, I think. If something isn’t clear here, feel free to leave a comment highlighting the issue, and I’ll try my best to improve this article.