The Voices in My Head

Well, I suppose I should apologise for not keeping this properly up to date. I know my last post was scant days ago, but that was a long rant on coffee, and not related to my virtual life at all. To be sure, there are coffee houses in the grid, but they don’t serve the kind of coffee you can drink, let alone the kind of coffee you add spices to.

And my post before that was a poem. That was part of my new year resolution to get back into creative writing. I’m aiming for a poem a week. This week’s poem will be posted in a day or three, but so far I am keeping up handily. It’s not really all that tough a schedule though, unless you are a lame writer like me. I used to be good, at least in my own mind. But I stopped for a long time after I accidentally let teh blue smoke escape from an old computer of mine.

So, like, what’s been happening?

The build for BigPond is finished, except for a few finalisation details. I also won first prize in a building contest over in Elvenglen, with my trinity knot necklace. I think I said I was going to give a copy of it to each of the high guardians of the elf circle group, a kind of badge of office. But that’s still in the future.

That necklace is one of a series of jewellery pieces I am making. They are going to be part of my new store, when i finally get one set up. Right now I am developing a new range of products to sell. My old inventory I used to sell will still be there of course. But a lot of it needs repricing, thanks to the linden dollar being a lot stronger than it used to be back when I originally set those prices. So everything will get marked down. Buildings too - from what I’ve seen, I overpriced those badly.

Those buildings weren’t the only thing overpriced. Land prices are through the roof right now. Yes, I know I can easily afford to buy those 512 m2 parcels priced at 10 grand or more. But to be blunt, it’s way overpriced. I might possibly consider that on a managed sim where there was appropriate space laid out for access and a building code I was happy with. But most of the mainland is prim trash, filled with laggy “clubs”, blocked out by camper chairs which would prevent my customers getting in, crowded out with ban lines, bordered by 16 m2 advertising parcels, just plain bad neighbours, or worse. For that kind of neighbourhood, no way would I pay the current inflated prices.

I remember…

There was a mountain… way back when
and a fountain…
and bells…

All around lay motes of silver…
floating… falling…
and bells…

And the fountain gave birth to a river…
bubbling forth…
and bells…

The river was fresh, clear, and I drank deep.
And then I knew.
…

I can never return there again.
The soft chime of the bells -
I can never hear that again.
Water has made my life serene.

but no bells

W.K.

So today I decided to hang out in the Ahern welcome area. That’s not actually the original welcome area (I think Plum is), but it’s the first one they made as a 4-sim cluster. It usually has a permanent traffic problem, with lots of lag, blingtards, and the occassional newbie.

So I like helping newbies. I keep telling people I’m nuts. But they never believe me. Maybe this’ll convince you all.

So anyway, I’m there maybe 2 minutes when his guy comes along and says hello in Japanese. So I say hello to him. In English. To be fair, my profile does say I can speak Japanese. It also says I can speak Serbo-Melanesian. Don’t take everything you read as the literal truth. Use a little judgement maybe guys?

Apparently, that reply in English didn’t put him off the Japanese schtick. He tried to continue the conversation in Japanese. Now, I am fairly certain he wasn’t Japanese. Japanese people do not type Japanese using English characters. And they don’t use “anata” the way this guy was. But I have been wrong before. call me a cynic. So I switched to Japanese typing mode, and replied to him in fluent Japanese. Lo and behold! He was stumped!

Guys, if you want to be charming and friendly, that’s cool. Need help? That’s cool. Practice your Japanese? That’s cool too. But if your Japanese vocabulary is limited to “hello”, “how are you”, “awesome”, and “cute”, then perhaps you need to take some more classes before going for conversation practice.

So, yeah, I’m out of Big Brother. It was fun while it lasted. I never expected to win, but I am kind of dissapointed that I didn’t even make the first cut from the 15.

Apparently the final total number of votes in the sim was around 1000 or so, which makes an average of 60 votes for each person. 60 votes for me would probably have guaranteed my place in the second week. Of the community groups I am in, one has 430 members, another 180 members. If even a tenth of these people had taken a few minutes to come and vote, I would still be in. It is a little dissapointing to see how little some people care.

• From something they said to me, I suspect one of the players may be a mole. This of course is standard practice by now in BB anyway, so its not too surprising. From other things I have seen, I suspect the final winner may already have been chosen by Endemol. You heard it here first; the winner has a connection with the Netherlands. That’s right; from the start I never expected to win the top prize.
• The whole event seems less organised than I had hoped. There is no real security in the sim, and it was griefed several times before they realised they can block visitors from running scripts.
• Endemol has apparently spent almost nothing promoting this event. Certainly not compared to the people still in the game. One player ran a full page advert in an online newspaper. Another was interviewed by one of the more popular podcasts on the net. A third appeared live on Dutch TV. That isn’t Big Brother except in name. It’s an Internet election campaign. Most of the players still in even have someone (or more than one person) acting as full-time campaign managers.
• A few of the people still in have used sex to persuade people to vote for them. Given the nature of SL, there wasn’t much to stop me rezzing a dancing pole, turning my avatar into a striper, and giving the punters a good show to persuade them to vote for me. But I have my pride at least, and I did not stoop to that.

I do of course have a few more things to say about this event, and I’d be happy to share them directly with BB, should they ask. But most of them wouldn’t be right to air on a blog until at least after the event is over.

Fell down in the first round of voting. More to say later, but seeing as how I had to get up at 2:30 am for the eviction ceremony, I’m going back to bed now.