Socially|Mundane

My mind is always cranking hard. Ideas, thoughts, musings, ideas, to-dos, reasoning things, analyzing things... just a flood of a mish-mash of things. I enjoy learning new things all the time. my mind never stops trying to figure how thing works. What makes things happen the way they do? Why do people say or believe the things they say or believe and so on.

Once of those thoughts kind of stuck with me and that's the whole "Real Life" reference we see thrown about so often. The term, and why it's used so often has been pinging around in my head for months. Like so many who blog, I decided to write my thoughts about it and maybe make a little sense of it. At least from my perspective.

Everywhere you go, the term 'Real Life"; truncated to "RL" is thrown around at every single reference to our "First Lives". It's as though there is "Real Life" and then there is ... what... a cartoon? A video game? If that's the case, why refer to First Life as "Real Life" in the first place? (no pun intended.) Wouldn't it just be "Life" versus "Video Game"? But heated arguments have evolved out of the whole 'SL is a game" (or not) business.

Is your Second Life any less "real" than your First Life? If it is, then I suppose "Real Life" is a good reference for the physical world and everything you think of, do and feel in Second Life is false.

However, based on that other word thrown around so often in SL, "Drama", which suggests Second Life is "Real Life", then why use the term "RL" to separate the two?

Well, I wrote a lot more than that. But did it over at my 'personal' blog. No, I don't consider Common Sensible to be my 'personal' blog. I don't know why. I think it's because I'm actually hoping to invite other writers to contribute.

But, like I said, my mind is always blazing at a million miles an hour, a huge "things to do" list in the back of my head and the list grows faster than I can accomplish the items on it. Inviting others to write here is one of those items.

I'll get to it one of these days.
In the mean time, if you'd like to give it a go, email me at pixietale [at] gmail.com. I'll let you have a go if you like and no, you don't have to write something every day and it certainly doesn't need to be the long-winded rhetoric like I write about.

So, I'm curious what you think of my ranting about whether "real life" is really real life or not. Well, that's not the real question, but you get the idea. Take a peek over there and shout me down in comments if you are so inclined.

This made news a long time ago, when an application for trademark registration for the look of a Second Life avatar was submitted by Second Life resident Aimee Weber.

It's no surprise as she has been highly successful in the SL environment since early on. The world always hears about Anshe Chung and Stroker Serpentine, but there are many more who've turned their activity in an MMO into a real business. And now, her Second Life "look" is now a legally registered trademark:

USPTO Grants Protection to an Avatar: "The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) approved a trademark registration filed by a person seeking to protect her avatar image, which represents the content services provided by the avatar’s creator in the Second Life virtual world. Commentators have noted that this decision is groundbreaking as it opens doors for further real life trademark protection for images used in virtual worlds."

More than the actual news about this particular case, what can be conceived here is that the United States Patent and Trademark Office will in fact recognize creations that are technically only available inside a virtual environment.

Obviously the image of Amimee's avatar can be screen-captured and printed and otherwise placed into many different forms of media. But it still is something created from scratch entirely within the virtual environment and it thereby, for all practical intent's and purposes: intangible.

Hmmm... I already have a lock on my SL account name, including ariblackthorne.com and .net and .org and .info.... Maybe I should copyright me, too?

via "Internet Business Law"

Jack posted a late-nighter about bots:

Much Ado About Bots - Land and Sea - Second Life Blogs:
"Now some uses of Bots have a positive effect on the experience inworld and some have a negative impact. They can be used to provide fun interactions such as a robot bartender or an NPC in a roleplay situation. They can also perform useful actions like land management. As with the scripting language which can be used for bad as well as good, Bots are not the problem but rather the way they are sometimes used"

I concur.

I use a bot myself. One, single, solitary bot to automatically manage my merchant group (auto-invite and eject based on when a merchant leases space in my market.)

However, when I go sim-hopping, I've discovered that the map is useful: if there are a lot of green dots - don't bother. They're camping bots. In fact, I am of the absolutely solid impression that one of every 8 or 9 dots on the entire grid map is really a human.

The rest...

Well, you get the idea.
courtesy of