Being a community manager for such a fractious and demanding bunch as us Sansar users is not a job for the faint of heart. Sansar’s hard-working, affable community manager, Galileo Linden, has done a top-notch job keeping us in line, and guess what? Today is his birthday!
Happy birthday, Galileo!
If you are still casting around for ideas for your Second Life Halloween outfit, might I suggest a Halloween hunt on now at AsteroidBox? The hunt is completely free, and you don’t have to join any group! I will show you each of the nine bloody hunt prizes, so you can decide for yourself if you want to do this hunt.
The avatar used in the pictures in this blogpost is a Bakes on Mesh-enabled combination of an Akeruka Cleo mesh head and an Altamura Juliet mesh body. (Both were free group gifts earlier this year.) I have found that most clothing designed for the Maitreya Lara mesh body fits the Altamura mesh body with a minimum of fuss.
If you have a recent Akeruka Bento mesh head like Cleo, you can hit the redelivery terminal in the lobby of the Akeruka store to get an updated version, which includes a separate Bakes on Mesh head in the package. Altamura has released a relay for use with Bakes on Mesh (it’s available to Altamura group members for free at this exact SLURL; the Altamura Design/Mesh Avatars group costs L$50 to join). You do have to buy and install the Omega system kit on the Juliet body before you can use the Bakes on Mesh relay (it’s for sale for L$99 at this exact SLURL).
The skin I am using on this avatar is by Atmoic Bambi, and is called Noori Noir. Unfortunately, the store is also no longer on the grid. This is an older system skin, so the area around the fingernails doesn’t quite match the Altamura mesh nails. I found that my earlier solution, the free finger and foot fixes available from League which I mentioned in this earlier blogpost, didn’t work for grey skin. To fix the area around the fingernails to match this deathly grey pallor exactly, I used nail covers by SmitCoStudios, which you can edit and tint any colour you wish (they are available for L$25 on the SL Marketplace).
The hair is the Pulled Back Bun (black) from the Library / Accessories / Hair Design Options / Pulled Back Bun folder in your existing Second Lofe inventory—free, adjustable, tintable, uncomplicated. The bloody skin tattoos came from a past Bloody Mess hunt at Fallen Gods, and I picked them up several years ago. (The bright red bloody forehead tattoo came from a different past hunt, along with a bloody blonde wig.)
Now that we’ve got the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to the hunt! Here is the Carina laced corset paired with the Canopus boots:
The next outfit consists of the Selene shirt and Malus pants (the black pumps are part of a free sample pack of Slink-compatible shoes from Garbaggio, available on the SL Marketplace; Altamura mesh bodies have Slink-compatible feet). The blood-splattered Notos umbrella is also an AsteroidBox hunt prize! It comes with the pose shown here.
Here we have the bloody Theia glasses and the Auriga sweater:
And finally, we have something a little different: a couple of minidresses in black and red! These both look so good, so you could probably wear them for a non-Halloween night out.
This is the Powehi dress, which comes with a HUD to change the metal textures:
And finally we have the sexy Eridani dress:
Happy Halloween hunting! You can obtain the first hunt hint by clicking on the board at the entrance to the AsteroidBox store, shown in the first picture above. Each hunt prize comes with a hint for the next prize.
Once again, I have resurrected an older system skin and outfit, this time to create a wizard for Halloween! The mesh avatar I am using is the Altamura Romeo full-body mesh avatar, which requires a couple of additions to support Bakes on Mesh:
This avatar is wearing:
Pictures taken at Luane’s Magical World.
Well, as many of you already know, I left Facebook at the end of last year as my New Year’s resolution. But you might not know that I have now resurrected my account on the Facebook social network.
In my first post to my Facebook timeline (and perhaps the only one I am willing to make for quite some time), I write the following:
Yes, after leaving Facebook at the end of last year as my New Year’s resolution, and asking Facebook to delete over 13 years’ worth of data it had collected about me, I have decided to set up an account again.
Why? Well, as a social VR/virtual worlds blogger, I want to be able to cover Facebook’s new social VR platform, Facebook Horizon, and that apparently will require an account on the Facebook social network to use (it launches in closed beta in early 2020).
So, I am back, but don’t expect me to post a lot, or use this account very much. After the Cambridge Analytica/Trump/Brexit scandal (covered so well by the Netflix documentary The Great Hack), I am very, VERY wary to share a lot of data here for Facebook to strip-mine for profit!
Which leads me (in a roundabout way) to the point of this blogpost. There is an exceptionally well-written, well-reasoned article by Siva Vaidhyanathan on The Guardian newspaper website, titled Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand free speech in the 21st century. Dr. Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of the book Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. He addresses a recent speech Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave to students at Georgetown University, which has been criticized by many commentators, including Martin Luther King’s daughter Bernice:
I strongly urge you to read Dr. Vaidhyanathan’s article yourself, but I did want to quote a few sections that I thought made insightful arguments:
Facebook has three defining attributes that make Facebook Facebook. Its scale of 2.4 billion people uploading content in more than 150 languages make it too big to filter. Its algorithmic design that amplifies content judged to attract attention and interaction (clicks, shares, likes, comments) favors extremism and powerful emotions over rational and measured expression. And the cheap and effective advertising system is monumentally profitable and thus starves other sources of good information of needed revenue.
In his speech Thursday Zuckerberg boasted that the Black Lives Matter movement started on Facebook. It did. But it also almost died there. It jumped to Twitter and thrived. As the internet scholar Zeynep Tufekci has explained, Facebook’s algorithmic system squelched #BlackLivesMatter and other activist movements as it was promoting vapid images like the Ice Bucket Challenge. On Twitter, with much lighter algorithmic amplification, #BlackLivesMatter could hold attention.
Zuckerberg also neglected the fact that the largest Black Lives Matter group on Facebook was hosted by a white man from Australia and was otherwise completely fake.
Zuckerberg wants us to believe that one must be for or against free speech with no nuance, complexity or cultural specificity, despite running a company that’s drowning in complexity. He wants our discussions to be as abstract and idealistic as possible. He wants us not to look too closely at Facebook itself.
…
The problem of the 21st century is cacophony. Too many people are yelling at the same time. Attentions fracture. Passions erupt. Facts crumble. It’s increasingly hard to deliberate deeply about complex crucial issues with an informed public. We have access to more knowledge yet we can’t think and talk like adults about serious things.
By invoking all the progressive social movements that have found Facebook useful, Zuckerberg tries to hitch his company to their results. But ignoring the Nazis and misogynists who also use Facebook to organize and recruit, he hopes we equate motivation with free speech and democracy.
The thing is, a thriving democracy needs more than motivation, the ability to find and organize like-minded people. Democracies also need deliberation. We have let the institutions that foster discussion among well informed, differently-minded people crumble. Soon all we will have left is Facebook. Look at Myanmar to see how well that works.
This is a perfect encapsulation of what I think is wrong with Facebook. Put simply, Facebook has too much power, and it wields that power in a demonstrably inconsistent fashion when it comes to free speech.
So, informed by past experience, I will severely limit how much information I choose to share on Facebook, and who I choose to befriend. I will restrict when and how often I check Facebook (for example, I will not install the app on my iPhone, and I will only access the Facebook website via a Chrome browser with the highly-recommended F.B. Purity extension added).
And I do not want to live in a world where Facebook has the loudest megaphone. I will continue to pursue and peruse my news from authoritative sources outside Facebook, such as The Guardian. And I will actively promote campaigns such as BreakTheFake, which provide helpful tips for consumers to determine fact from fiction on the Internet.
Social media such as Facebook has been weaponized, and is being used against us. The situation demands that we all become smarter consumers of information. The future absolutely depends on it.