Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Second Life™ has a valuable virtual real estate market. Yet, SL is not the only virtual world with real estate issues. ArcheAge is coming up on a new land rush and the problems of players losing existing land holdings.
In SL we often hear ‘the rent is too damn high’ exclaimed. I’m one that disagrees and believes the free market gives people control of what they pay or receive and most equitably distributes land and sets prices.
Many in Second Life™ were and are pro Net Neutrality. The ideas associated with the words Net Neutrality are noble sounding but dig in and you find they are out of touch with the reality of the laws being passed and basic economics.
(image gone…) Bound III by Sacha Audeburgh, on FlickrIn America we are seeing the US State Dept. making the first rules to kill free speech on the Internet and turn it into Government Approved Speech ONLY. Of course, they have chosen an emotional issue many liberals can get behind: gun control. Is it OK to ban this type of speech? I suspect many liberals will think so. They are banning hate speech, the first step and that OK with many, now gun related speech, don’t you wonder what is next? Obviously free speech is going away, if we allow this trend to continue.
Fashion is big in Second Life™. I am never sure if SL is leading RL trends or following them. I think I can provide examples of both cases. But, I’m not that big into fashion, so I would be arguing the point with limited knowledge. That is usually a popular path that leads to disaster.
I am politically active and I am seeing lots of liberal/progressive writers coming down on fashion designers and bloggers. The new politically correct term dividing people is now “Cultural Appropriation”. Writers like Taylor Bryant have bought into the idea and are helping out by promoting aversion to Cultural Appropriation.
Someone got the idea to run a poll of which sex is more fun, RL or SL/Virtual sex. RL won, no surprise there. But, 36% thought Second Life™ sex was more fun… hummm.
On a side note: It is the owner of Basilique, the place where the Lindens are doing their meet up today, that conducted the study: Canary Beck.
Maria Korolov posted a link to a recent study of sex in SL in her: Survey: virtual sex less fun, but more liberated.
The full study she refers to is here: Second Life sex versus real life sex. It is long and well worth reading. I touch on JUST the parts I found really interesting.
No surprise, they found in a 2012 study and this recent study that sexual practices in Real Life and Second Life differ. So, you are not the only one that is more kinky in SL than RL.
Philosophy is one of my interests. To discuss philosophy requires good debating skills and open minded skepticism. Both things I find those recently educated in the public school systems lack. Skepticism also needs a good measure of critical thinking ability.
Every so often I am moved to point out the fallacies in subjects considered by many to be truisms. Man made global warming is a wonderful subject for dividing the thinkers from the gullible.
Strawberry started it… we’ll blame her… (reference) Hamlet has joined in and made a statement in: The Capricious Cruelty of Mean Anonymous Comments. I had a bit of say in: Second Life: How to Stop Mean Comments… But, we often get things all out of proportion, losing all perspective. I’ll see if I can bring some perspective to a number of related issues.
First, blaming Strawberry is ridiculous, she called our attention to a human behavior I believe we need to consider. But, my first sentence is something we see too often; spin, direction, implied critique, implied wrongness of some unspecified kind… Someone writes something in jest, error, or maliciously then someone else takes it seriously, believes it true-accurate, or for their own reasons and/or agenda finds the maliciousness servers them and jumps on the wagon.