Fantasy roleplay is fun, but we need to stop calling it medieval

I was about to post this on Honor’s blog, but I realized that she was just doing a screenshot exploring of a beautiful sim, and my “rant” would seem off-topic and if said there, mean. Because I enjoy her blog a lot, and my rant is at ‘some other’.

This is a general point about how this genre gets named in Second Life, and among roleplay folks in general. Not aimed at anyone other than whoever is in charge of terminology around here. :p

Been thinking about Roleplay a lot lately myself – in a quest for the right theme for me.

I’ve always been annoyed at the term ‘medieval’ for these roleplay places. They are anything but.

An actual medieval setting would have guns and canons of varying ranges of advancement (starting at 800 AD in Asia, and hitting Europe by 1222 in massive amounts, but even seen earlier in Crusades. Heavy plate armors developed near the end of the period (1400s-1600s).

Peasants throughout the entire period had no freedom of movement or profession, and little to no rights. They were for all intents and purposes slaves.

Punishments were often brutal and inflicted on a clan basis rather than individual. You steal from me, I get the right to kill your daughters – that kind of thinking. But there was no -city guard-. Policing developed mostly in the 1800s. “Law” was enforced by noble clans/families attacking each other in vengeance until higher nobility stepped in to wipe one side out or broker a peace. If your serf did something, I went to you, and demanding compensation. If I killed one of your serfs, you might be able to exact a few coins payment out of me – if the ‘lord’ we both swore fealty to felt that needed.

Anyone off “adventuring” would have been a landless noble. They were the only people with such freedom. And they had it because they were not allowed to be gainfully employed. If they lacked land and serf to prey upon, they had to either be the butt-kisser of some other noble (Courtier / Concubine), or go off and kill people to take their things (Conquistador / Crusader / Knight).

People got married young. As in, get your period and off you go, drop some babies for us. Health was poor. Famine would wipe out many every year (the entire point of the spice trade and age of exploration was to improve food resources – preservatives), disease would get many more. For much of the period cities were much larger than fantasy claims them to be. Only during the black plague did it get cut down so far. They were smaller than during imperial Roman days, and smaller than during the age of exploration. But not tiny. And cities of over a million did exist elsewhere on the planet (Bagdad in 775 AD hit 1 million, Tenochtitlan was about 200,000 during the time of the black plague).

Printing was around. Yes… while Gutenberg’s press is 1436, other more primative ones were about earlier. The screw press was in Rome by the first century AD. Yet despite all of this, almost everyone was illiterate. This is the reason they call it the dark ages – small handfuls of people in Europe retained the technology of literacy, while elsewhere in the world the idea of reading was spreading. Libraries were being built in Mesoamerica, new alphabets were being designed in Asia, and math, philosophy, and theological debate were advancing in Africa and the Near East. The Europeans in this period were the savages of the world. They got lucky later on in mixing, as it is said, guns, germs, and steel – in one location.

This was a harsh world, with very few fun elements to it.

Fantasy adventure and roleplay is fun. But we need to stop calling it medieval.

Fantasy has too many things the Medieval European world lacked, and lacks some critical things it did have.

The fantasy concept is all about adventure and grand stories – so its fine that it is not medieval, because the actual medieval period is a less adventurous notion than even our modern world.

-1L$ Balance – Are ‘keep up to date’ groups using members to covertly fund merchant advertising?

-1$L… Logged into some alts that get little use recently, and found this as my balance on the both of them. Account Manager page – nothing. Only goes back a month. The thing ought to show the greater of the last month or the last 30 entries…

Look through my groups, notice something.

A lot of purely social groups, or merchant advertiser groups – the ones that spam you into submission to get you to join… are now setting regular customers as ‘pay into and out of group liabilities.’ So apparently my funds on those alts got drained to pay for their search listings, land fees, and adverts. Good thing I likely had less than 10L on them each…

But its a cautionary tale: Should we leave all the groups we’re in if we don’t have strong reasons to trust who’s running them (if they’re owned by strangers)? Is it time to get out of customer groups…

It would be nice if the bottom rank of groups could not have the ‘pay liabilities and receive group dividends’ option checked, and if being added to another rank in a group required a second permissions acceptance check.

As it stands… there’s some folks out there right now with some pretty shady ethics…

Why Jah? (why that word)

Today’s post is -NOT- about Second Life, but about how Rastafarians refer to the most high; Jah.

This is no scholarly article, just my insights. In fact this is pretty far from scholarly. :p

You will often see Western Christians make judgmental statements such as “there is only one God and his name is God, there is only one Christ and his name is Jesus.”

- As if English was the language of the Bible.

It wasn’t. “Jesus” didn’t grow up in Jersey, he came from Galilee.

Both of these words are translations. One of them is even a pagan word.

Yet I have lost count of the many times that I have heard people accuse Rastafarians and Jehovah’s Witnesses of not being followers of the faith because we (the both of us), use the words ‘Jah’ and ‘Yeshua’ rather than the modern western-Christian English words.

Look up the etymology of the word god. It refers to pagan germanic dieties. Think about that when you use that word.

So why Jah? Why do Rastafarians (and often Jehovah’s Witnesses as well) use the word Jah?

In short, its the Hebrew word – somewhat. The etymology entry is rather brief. Wikipedia will give you a bit more information.

The spelling started with a ‘Y’ instead of ‘J’ – with the Hebrew Bible using ‘J’ some 50 times. The Hebrew letter for ‘J’ being only about 500 years old. But that doesn’t mean that, lacking a letter for ‘J’, we can just toss in any old word…

‘J’ or ‘Y’, there is importance to this word. Its tradition, its in there in that book, and it pops up over and over again for a reason. We don’t call the Lord ‘Thor’ or ‘Zeus’, or ‘Mars’ for a -reason-. We probably shouldn’t be using the title of those guys either.

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As to the other comment, ‘Jesus’ – this is an improper translation. It should be Yeshua. This is not as bad as the above example. The goal here was to say ‘Yeshua’, and in old enough versions of English, you would pronounce ‘Jesus’ somewhat closer to the ‘Yeh-Shu-Ah’ that it is supposed to sound like.

Wikipedia’s entry on Yeshua is not very illuminating.
- Just has a tiny note at the top and a link to a page that only refers to him by the English name save for in footnotes.

This is more insightful:
http://jesusisajew.org/YESHUA.php
(if that URL offends you because you don’t think he was actually from Israel but from Liverpool or Brooklyn or something… just read the article anyway please…)
Various Wikipedia articles on Jesus cover the name transliteration history. But they quickly then go back to the English word.

The name Jesus is a transliteration of the Greek transliteration, that over time has lost its proper pronunciation as the English language went through significant changes in the last 2000 years at the hands of illiterate people, who, on finding Bibles and learning to reading – had to guess based on the language they spoke at what their forebears had written.

Yeshua though, is a very specific word with a very particular meaning in Hebrew:
Salvation from the Lord.

While it was not a unique name, despite that meaning… perhaps its important that we pay some respect to Christ having been given that name rather than say “Frank” or “Bubba”.

Someone might have been trying to get a bit of a message across in using that name…

Been silent a while, but still out there

I haven’t been around much lately, here or in Second Life. But I am still about.

I’ve gone through pending comments and cleared through the list. Also changed my ‘Callouts’ links on the right to a Tutorials section. Hopefully that will make it easier for people to find some things.

Second Life… Not sure why I’ve been quiet of late. Just kind of have. I consolidated a few bits of land – expanding what I had in Bay City but getting rid of some pieces here and there. I’m still working to get rid of a water lot I bought on a whim some time back.

I seem to have completely lost access to two old alts. But for different reasons that form cautionary tales.

The first one – they have a system on “forgot your password” where they will suspend your account if you don’t answer the security questions within a hidden number of tries. The problem is they don’t show the security question most of the time. Instead they pull from your friends list. If you have some people you friended that you don’t really know… you can get locked out – permanently.

Well… I can get that account back if I send them a copy of my state issued ID card… My RL one. Even though the account does not even have my RL info entered into it… (not even PIOF).

It was my old roleplay alt, so it had a long list of friends from old Pandaria Roleplay who were people I’d met once at an event and never spoke to again.

The cautionary tale is for businesses in Second Life. Quite a few merchants have sent me friends requests as a part of the conversation. If they don’t still remember me a few years later, and then they forget their password.

It won’t ask you if your pet is named “Muffykins”. It will ask you this:

[**********] Catnap
[**********] Resident
[**********] Oh

- So um… Maybe you remember me, and Resident, surely you can remember one of those folks (it doesn’t seem to care which of them). But do you remember your friend who’s name ended in ‘Oh’?

What if it was

[**********] Gossipgirl
- And you couldn’t think of -anyone- you knew with that handle, because the person was some random newbie who logged in for a day, bought your item, asked you how to use it, ran around with a box on the head for 3 hours, and quit – all back in 2010 during the few months that name was allowed.

Yeah… you just lost your Second Life account.

I recently went through and did screenshots for my friends list, on every alt…

But the real problem… if you hack my email, and you know my friends list – can you steal my account?

Because a lot of people kind of figure out each others friends over time.

Especially the ‘ex’ you’re having lots of drama with…

So the other account I lost I lost because it was proof against the above problem. Somehow I made it either without ever using an email address, or at least – I never recorded what that address was…

/fail.

On the two accounts combined, I’ve probably lost 30,000L worth of goods. But that’s small for me for the length of time. One of these alts was almost as old as my main – but rarely used. The other was very recent and made to theme with petites (actually she was made to grab screenshots for updating my ‘Getting Starting’ guide to V3, and then I gave her a Petite avatar makeover)…

But neither was a very “personally attached” avatar. Though I had a lot of Pandoria stuff on one made by folks who’ve moved on from SL.

Some basic hints here:

• Use an email on your account that is not used elsewhere. But write it down so you remember it.
• Write your password on something physical and physically secure (kept at home).
• Screenshot your friends list regularly.
• Keep your enemies further, and your friends secret.

As for what kind of password to use:

- But you still have to remember it…

Will Steam kill Zindra, and what age are gamers anyway?

I’m usually the blog that -DOESN’T- talk about the same hyped up stories as everyone else, but rather finds my own hype to get overworked about.

But here’s a second time I’m breaking that.

Been a while since I’ve blogged…

But some recent news is curious. Hamlet noted it here:
Second Life Coming Soon to Steam with Improved Graphics in Apparent Move to Position Virtual World as Gamer Platform
And:
Second Life on Steam as Expressed in a Single Screenshot
- Which is where I discovered this just today. A bit late to the party as I’ve been offline a lot of late.

Here’s the official announcement:
Second Life is Expanding to Steam

So this is some kind of gamer platform thingy I gather. As in “OMG, TEH GAMERZ, TEH IS INVADING! HIDE YOUR FURRIES!”

(Actually the only group of hardcore gamers I’ve ever found in SL -is- the furry community, a fact that drives me nuts as I go there and want to talk about ‘stuff’ and they’re all talking about ‘pwning’ each other in ‘mass result 47′ or something.

Annnnyyyywwwaaayyyy…

Average age of gamers is 37:
Study: The average gamer may be older than you think

Yeah, your kid has moved on to Facebook and wearing his jeans around his ankles…

Video games are for OLD PEOPLE…

Like Disco and mood rings…

By contrast average age of SL players is mid 30s from what people keep claiming.

Are we the same, or 2 years younger then them?

Probably the same. We’ve been telling ourselves SL is the older crowd, but this probably actually -IS- the gamer crowd already. We’re just the ones who were too slow to escape the zombies and orcs… So we’re in SL instead.

So what does this mean for the content we “love” in SL.

You know… the live music and philosophy and artisti… yeah right… who are we kidding?

The porn, bdsm, gor, furries, fashionistas, bloodlines, gothers, builders, and tinies… But mostly… the adult stuff…

I’m not in that scene, but we all know that’s the heart of this place. And I -do- SL-live on Zindra. It has the better neighbors these days…

By some odd twist of logic I’ve yet to wrap my head around, Zindra looks nicer than a lot of SL now… Somehow those adult builds that looked so amazingly garish I used to post about it all the time have gone. In 2009 it was all that ‘fugly WTF’ look. Now: something a lot better. They have the best looking land now, and often more pleasant or at least not -in your face- neighbors.

(I still won’t touch the groups over there, those folks went toxic from fighting each other, but the land is better.)

I kind of like how its evolved into a settled and mostly pleasant area over time.

Will all these Steam “gamers” they’re bringing in care about the ‘porntopia’ around SL… If they bother to show up?

Since they’re really just as old as us, maybe they’re already really past the ‘hormone age’ -not likely to do much harm- and possibly already here?

BUT… the public and game companies still think they’re selling to kids… so the real fear is… Will Steam force LLs to remove ‘A’ rated content and zones?

No idea…

I don’t think the people using Steam will care. But the public looking in and seeing a “porn game” listed on the Steam platform might force Steam’s hand to put a ‘damper’ on ‘that video game’ in some false belief that video games are still for kids.

Mesh clothes don’t care if you’re tall or short, thick or thin. They care about stretch of bust-waist-hips

I keep seeing this over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, again…

Something like this:

The [...] standard sizes are ridiculous. Oddly, they seem to have decided that [large are fat][small are skinny][etc]. I wonder if those who created the “standards” ever [assorted complaints]

This is because the person concerned is reading a word the way say, men use it when they shop in the real world.

Mesh clothing works a little more like a lot of T-Shirts do, and a lot of women’s cloths. Where a size small means you’re skinny, and a size large means you really don’t need to stop at Burger King on the way home tonight.

Think of it like this, using the standard sizes:

XXS: Michael Jackson would have done a concert to feed you.
XS: You look thin
S: You’re fit.
M: You shop in the plus size section.
L: You have reserved seating at the local Fried Chicken joint.

And just bump those one position for men, since male STandard sizes go from XS to XL. Male XL is basically female L.

You could still be taller than Abe Lincoln, or Shorter than Mini-Me. It just don’t matter.

Look at the standard sizes program, notice how it only seems to care about a few certain dails:

Women:
Body Fat
Torso Muscle
Breast Size
Love Handles
Belly Size
Leg Muscle
Butt Size
Saddle Bags

Men:
Body Fat
Belly Size
Torso Muscle
Love Handles
Leg Muscle
Butt Size
Saddle Bags
Package
Pectorals

Notice what’s not in there?

Height. Having T-Rex arms or legs. Your neck. Your head. Your ‘thickness’ dial.

Why? Cause mesh doesn’t care. These are scale dials, or for the head – would not be important unless you wanted to buy a mesh ski-mask to go rob the local stop-n-rob in Bay City (hey I own that shop…)

There are only two dials that matter for mesh that are -NOT- in the lists above; Breast Buoyancy and Cleavage. If you don’t know why – you’ve never touched real boobies…

So if you’re tall and thin, and you looked at Standard Sizes and thought “this is broken”… go try the XXS or XS size. That’s probably you.

Mesh fits a -LOT- more people than some think. Many who feel it doesn’t fit them are in fact within the zone of commonly used settings.

The deformer won’t help these folks. If they grab a ‘large’ mesh and deform it to their tall but thin avatar – it will be a mess of nasty triangles poking out. They need a small mesh, because they’re thin.

Some folks waiting for the deformer, will be in an EVEN WORSE MESS once it gets here, because they “never read the manual.” These folks just need to learn what mesh does effect, and then they can find existing items that are close. And the deformer will just take that close and get closer. It won’t turn a circle into a square folks – it will take a square and bevel it.

SL9B – something permanent like this please, to help retention

I’ve added this to my newbie category because I go into advice on finding communities here. But if you’re a new person, this is probably one to read a week or two after you join.

I’m going to break a personal policy I have. I usually do not like to blog about “the same stuff everyone else is” because then well… its just reading more of the same – and probably from someone (me) with less of an informed track (I’ve got my opinions, but lack the industry sources of many SL bloggers).

But this one I need to get out there and say, on my own blog, and not just as a comment on someone else’s. So its just my feelings on things that went well.

SL9B this year really seems to have been everything right about a community event.

I had Initially planned to boycott in protest of Linden Labs pulling out.

Started going as friends dragged me in.

I had a lot less lag at this one than I’ve ever seen in past. Perhaps due to the high presence of mesh; which tends to run faster than pre-mesh on systems capable of running it. Mesh, once you get it working on your system – is just like that. I know some people have nightmares getting to run. For those who’ve made it past the hurdle, its a refreshing future of a lower lag Second Life.

It was so smooth I was able to go to crowded sims and turn on shadows, play with windlight, and spam the feeds with screenshots.
http://my.secondlife.com/pussycat.catnap

The events were great, the builds were great – only a few commercial spammers got in under the radar. I’ve not been one for most events of late as they end up being nothing more than merchant spam-fests. This one was dedicated mostly to builds about communities and what folks love about SL. A section carved off for people who do media about SL, news, blogs, video – that was an added bonus. In fact need to start following http://metaversetv.com/ it looks, was already following http://treet.tv.

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I learned about a LOT of communities that I’d never heard of before. And I mean a -LOT-. Who knew there was so much variety out there? After a few years I’ve come to be jaded in thinking I was alone in a wilderness of BDSM, Vampires, and people who listen to music 3 decades old.

I still need to go back and get notecards for about 57 of them… O.o

And I don’t think there’s enough time for me to do it… /sigh. Maybe I’ll pull out an alt so I can go in stealth mode… and then end up IMing friends and defeating the purpose.

Something like this ought to be around all the time.

If a build like this was up 24/7… if even a micro version of it was the welcome area for people

• some easy way to discover new communities without getting spammed by merchants or ‘best in hoochie-mamma wear is up on the board, bring all your wish-they-could-be-crack-ho-friends’ events…
• I think that is what would help with retention in SL.

I spent an hour of Sunday morning chatting with a friend who’s recently passed her first rezzday. She was bemoaning how hard its been of late finding people to meet and places to go. She’s in that critical stage in SL where the things you did as a new resident have lost their magic and you need to find something that really syncs with you or SL will get set aside…

SL9B’s style of builds would be the answer – you can run through there and more than likely find something.

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I suspect Linden Labs is sitting there smugly feeling they made the right move in pulling out and making residents pay to host their party. But I’m not sure if this went off better because of that, or despite it. It was rushed – and in a rush sometimes people pull together out of crisis more than they might otherwise do. I suspect this went off well due to folks pulling together and setting aside disputes (for the most part – I’m aware of two builds that had to be pulled), in order to meet a very short notice. Given time, the same chaos might unravel into a mess.

Oddly, there have been more linden sightings this last week than I’ve ever seen before. Not by me, but by many others. All over the place.

Last year’s SL8B – they seemed to avoid all but the keynote speeches. This year they’ve been all over the grid, and some posting journals on the feeds.
- I hope that continues as well.

Its a very good sign.

The more the lindens publicly appear to be engaged, the more faith customers will have in the product.

I read lindens all the time complaining when we say they don’t care – stating that yes they do, and many log in on personal accounts from home every day, or during work on linden accounts, etc, yadda yadda.
- But that counts for nothing if we don’t see it.

You can care all you want, if nobody knows, no one has faith in you. Show it. And recently some of them have begun to do so.

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As for some kind of build like SL9B, as a permanent thing, what would that look like? Could it be done in a single sim?

Possibly. Maybe. Something to think about.

Could this just comes down to a more effective version of the destination guide? Seeing signs that show communities, and give out a little bit of info, and will take you there.
- Something that effectively filters out the commerce.

Commerce has its place, but that place is not everywhere…

Granted the most effective means would be micro builds… but there are only so many prims to go around. Unless each sign was a rezzer – that rezzed a 100-prim build for a viewer to look at.

Imagine that as an idea. Click through the sign to find your theme of interest, rez a sample, and up pops a scene of something. Perhaps a recreation of a Tiny community, or a stage for a theater community, with a few little prim actors, or a sailboat on water for a sailing community.

- Something visual for people to sink their minds into, gain interest, and go visit the ‘real community.’

That’s what we need, and we need something like at almost every infohub and welcome center in SL…

SL9B shows that we can showcase the diverse communities in SL in an appealing way – the trick is to figure out how to do this all the time.